When I was a teen, I Blu Tacked pictures of my icons to my bedroom wall, setting places for a dinner party I was 10 years too young to have and two decades late for. I thought carefully about where to place Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Billy Crystal, Peter Cook and the early 1960s comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May (photographed before they split and each became acclaimed directors). I loved Britpop, and placed Blur beside Steve Martin, so it looked as though he had gone prematurely grey from the stress of working as their security detail.
Sometimes my dad, grumbling about the stains revealed on my walls whenever the posters were rearranged, would walk in and bellow “Blu Tack must die”, then walk out again. I had started to watch Mike Nichols’ movies with my mum: the The Graduate, Working Girl and Postcards from the Edge were moments of true pleasure. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I couldn’t yet put the words in the right order to get what was in myhead on to the page. So I just kept moving the pictures around: Jarvis Cocker beside Peter Cook seemed reasonable, Lauren Bacall to De La Soul stimulating.
Eventually I became one – a writer – and was hired to adapt my memoir into a movie. Given that it was about how a dying psychiatrist changed my life after my hospitalisation for bipolar, it consisted mainly of two characters talking in rooms, so I was bewildered when the budget came in at $25m. There was a star comedian pitching hard for it as her first dramatic vehicle and a child actor pitching it as her adult crossover. After several false starts, it ended up in the hands of someone I was thrilled by. A truly lovely actor, she was smart, sensitive and had great ideas. She sat in my tiny living room and cried as she talked about what the piece meant to her. She asked my permission to share it with Nichols, with whom she had recently worked and who had become a mentor.
My parents had told me before that my work had made them proud. But this was very different. This was our enmeshment bringing life-changing dividends. I happened to be back in what had once been my teenage bedroom as I waited that weekend. Knowing it was in Nichols’ hands, I slept under his picture.
My agent called days later.
“Well, Mike isn’t going to do it.”
Oh.
“He didn’t respond to the script. I don’t know what happened but he really … didn’t respond”.
I asked who the actor thought we should go to next.
I heard my agent’s intake of breath, sensed the rolling call sheet of next clients waiting to hear from her.
“Mike’s told her she shouldn’t do the movie either. I’m not sure she’s going to stay in.”
I looked up at the poster. I felt as if I was kneeling in front of a saint who, when you made a pilgrimage in its honour, instead of crying blood, said critical things about you to your agent.
Being judged wanting by Mike Nichols is not like feeling hurt by a one-star Amazon review from a stranger. You can’t say, “Well what does he know?” He knows a lot. Before Uber was invented and I lived in LA without a car, I was once on a bus that got stalled for 45 minutes halfway up Lookout Mountain. Trying to figure out what was happening, I turned to my fellow passengers and asked: “Do you know if there’s been an accident?”
A voice piped up, outraged. “Everything is not about you!” The woman, staunch and stinky, turned to our fellow passengers “This girl thinks everything is about her!” Then fixed me again: “My God!”
The incident prepped me for bad reviews, as in the outlandishly bad ones that make me laugh. They’re easier to take when they’re really bad: you’re able to rationalise as: “Oh you hate me. You’re just a mad person on a bus!” But also, in the dark, late at night, the mind wonders: maybe the woman on the bus has just seen some key part of me that non-mad people are too polite to see.
I didn’t know how to tell my mum that Mike Nichols had hated my script and warned off my lead actor. Because though it was partly about Nichols himself, it was also a lot about her and what we’ve given each other in cultural exchanges that echo love. That when she’s gone, the films and songs she gave me will still be there.
I was maudlin with my agent as the conversation wound down. She exhaled.
“Listen! This is what Mike does. We spend forever convincing an A-list actor to attach to a script and then Mike advises them not to. He talked one of my clients out of a role she then had to watch another actress get an Oscar for.”
Maybe Mike Nichols was right to talk people he cared about out of roles he didn’t think were good enough for them. Maybe he was also – something else? It is always a struggle to accept that people we love can have positive and negative qualities at the same time. I still adore Nichols’ movies. I still weep at the end of Closer, when you see the once-belittled Alice moving confidently through the crowd. I can never walk away from Postcards. My favourite is Working Girl. After the call with my agent, I began to picture Nichols as Harrison Ford, wanting her to succeed, and simultaneously as Sigourney Weaver, wanting to stop her. I imagine him as the soundtrack, which is indelible, and the shots of the twin towers, that are gone for ever.
Of all the events in my life, it might have been the one that best prepped me for getting divorced. I was incredibly disappointed and hurt and ashamed that it hadn’t worked out. But the love that was there is still there. The feeling of shame is not pleasant. But it is also not un-useful. Nichols’ movies always captured it so beautifully.
Emma Forrest is the author of Busy Being Free, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £14.99
