When a biographer is confronted with a reclusive or recalcitrant subject, there are two ways to proceed. One option is to charm, cajole, or at least play along with the subject to achieve cooperation. The other is to hector and pester the subject, and when the subject shows some signs of interest, to refuse to let him or her dictate the terms and thereby assure nonparticipation.
Unfortunately, the latter seems closer to the approach of author Carrie Courogen in Miss May Does Not Exist, her new biography of Elaine May, the nimble-witted onetime partner of Mike Nichols in the Nichols and May improvisational comedy team, shrewd writer (and rewriter) of screenplays, and, above all, director of four of the meanest, most merciless kind-of comedies ever made in Hollywood: A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky, and Ishtar.
In addition to these things, May is also something else: one of the most notorious hermits in show business who would therefore require special handling by a biographer. Her interviews are fitful, her public profile nonexistent, and her output irregular.
Alas, judging by the account offered in a rather defensive prologue, Courogen did not do enough, intelligently enough, to lasso her subject’s involvement. Since Courogen found herself living, during the writing of this book, two blocks from May on the Upper West Side, she claims that she began to experience constant May “sightings”: women who might be May waiting to cross the street or buying groceries. But Courogen can’t be sure which Elaines were real and which were fake because she “never had the guts to say anything — because, really, what would I even say?”
This is not a promising admission for a biographer. Courogen had alternate plans of attack, but they sound random and half-baked, including sending May postcards, cookies, and $200 worth of scans of family documents. She also dialed a lot of phone numbers and sent emails to dead accounts. Is this what Robert A. Caro would do?
As it happens, Courogen did finally get a reaction from May, who, through an intermediary, agreed to furnish written replies to four questions provided that the resulting Q&A was printed in full. Yet, rather unforgivably, Courogen fumbled at the goal line when she balked at May’s “edits of my questions” and thereby gave May the chance to back out.
Instead, Courogen had to go it alone — or, at least, without May. Yes, she has done her homework, scoured the archives, and spoken to May’s colleagues and even some close friends. But there is something missing. May is represented in quotes taken from old, sometimes ancient, articles and interviews, but she is not present in the here and now. She cannot clarify, elaborate, or explain anything under discussion.
A case in point is Courogen’s thumbnail sketch of May’s harrowing upbringing, which is rushed through in a single chapter. Born in Philadelphia in 1932, May was the daughter of talented but penurious Yiddish theater performer Jack Berlin and his formidable wife, Ida. The family of the former could not stand the latter, so when Jack was felled by a heart attack at age 47, Ida had to chart a course on her own. “All she had to her name was 76 cents, nearly $600 worth of pawn tickets with interest due in less than two months, and a traumatized child to support,” Courogen writes. How Elaine felt, or feels, about any of this is mostly speculation, so Courogen is forced to write long paragraphs with assertions on the order of the following: “By the time she was ten years old, Elaine knew this to be true: People you love will leave.” And: “In real life, sometimes people just die, and there is no understanding or explaining it.”
The book intermittently comes alive whenever Courogen includes the rare previously published comment or wisecrack by May about something in her life, such as when she said, referring to her having changed schools upward of 50 times as a youth: “I kept learning that Mesopotamia was the first city.”
Relying on the help of her brother Louis, Ida and her daughter pulled up stakes first for Chicago and then for Los Angeles. All of this is, by necessity, covered fleetingly. By page 17, Courogen is up to Elaine’s first marriage — at age 16, she married 19-year-old Marvin May — and the birth of her daughter Jeannie. By page 18, the union is over, and May is plotting a return to Chicago, where, in time, she will become associated with the Compass Players and eventually Mike Nichols. This abbreviated account of May’s formative years alone keeps this biography from being definitive.
Of course, the book gains considerable depth once May enters the public eye with Nichols and May, which was officially established in 1959. Courogen is happy to trod anew on well-trod ground. It is funny to read again an account of May’s initial encounter with her future comedy partner when she attended a Chicago performance of Miss Julie starring Nichols, at whom May shot contemptuous glances. “This evil, hostile girl in the front row staring at me throughout the performance.”
It is electrifying to read of the tension and brinkmanship inherent in their improvisational work. And there is certainly pleasure in being reminded of the classic Nichols and May routines, including the “Mother and Son” routine about a self-pitying mother upbraiding her grown son and its origins in an actual call Nichols received from his own mother: “Hello, Michael. This is your mother speaking. Do you remember me?”
Nichols and May, as a self-contained performing duo, was a spent force by the early 1960s, and Nichols proceeded to become everybody’s favorite young filmmaker with instant-classic movies like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. In 1971, May inaugurated her own directorial career with the painfully brilliant A New Leaf. She stars as Henrietta Lowell, a profoundly inelegant, seemingly unmarriageable heiress who is wed to a pauperized murderer (Walter Matthau).
Painful brilliance would become May’s stock-in-trade. In a cringe-inducing setup, The Heartbreak Kid (1972) stars Charles Grodin as an anhedonic man who cruelly spurns his newlywed wife (May’s own daughter Jeannie) but seems on the verge of growing equally discontent with the woman he left her for (Cybill Shepherd). Even the epically unsuccessful, unfairly loathed Ishtar (1987) has, at its heart, a believably piteous dynamic: Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman are talent-free singer-songwriters whose reverence for Simon & Garfunkel is presented as the summit of lameness.
Courogen covers these projects, and the countless others that May wrote, contributed to, or dreamt up, in abundant but empty detail. Too often, her accounts read like standard behind-the-scenes histories. Yes, we understand that May’s meticulousness and perfectionism led her to keep producing excessively long scripts, overshoot on the set while waiting interminably for magic to happen between performers, and spend endless hours in the cutting room sifting through it all. But why?
Courogen is left to make windy guesses: “If she could do as much as possible herself, if everything could just be done her way, then maybe she could beat them at their game.” The book has a bit too much dime-store psychology for a figure as cutting and sardonic as May, who once said, in describing her objectives in writing A New Leaf: “I wrote this movie script that I wanted to sell for a lot of money so that I could be richer.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Above all, it’s a stretch to infer, as Courogen does here and there, that May was in any way a victim of sexism in Hollywood. After all, the industry kept giving her directing assignments despite her genuinely eccentric working methods, including, at one point, being accused by Paramount of walking off with reels from her then-unfinished film, the masterly mob drama Mikey and Nicky. The industry also compensated her handsomely for doing uncredited rewrites of films like Tootsie — whose star, Hoffman, said: “Elaine is the one who made the movie work.” Plenty of male directors were sidelined for making bombs or behaving crazily. Just ask Michael Cimino. But even after Ishtar, May recaptured her spot on the screenwriting A-list, writing The Birdcage and Primary Colors for Nichols. And in front of the camera, she co-starred with Woody Allen in Small Time Crooks — and essentially walked away with the whole movie.
Would this book have been better if Courogen had extracted that four-question interview from May? Who knows? Perhaps whatever May would have said would have amounted to a kind of joke. Then again, what if Courogen had established a rapport with her frustrating subject? What if May had started…talking? The door was ever so slightly ajar, but Courogen failed to walk in. We are left with a book that tells us both a great deal and very little about its subject.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
