John Lahr's Brilliant "Making It Real"

Mike Nichols (Photo by Bob Willoughby)

Simon Callow, in his absorbing “Charm Defensive” (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2020), a review of Ash Carter and Sam Kashner’s Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of his Closest Friends, refers to John Lahr’s New Yorker profile of Nichols, “Making It Real” (February 21, 2000; included in Lahr’s wonderful 2015 collection Joy Ride). Callow writes,

The final summing-up belongs to John Lahr, who in his New Yorker profile and in his many shafts of insight throughout Life Isn’t Everything seems to have penetrated him to the core: at the end of his interview for the profile, Mike expressed himself pleased. “I do well with the fundamentally inconsolable,” said Lahr. Mike closed his eyes for a second and sighed, then said: “We get a lot done, you know.”

Lahr’s profile is great. How does he achieve such penetration? What is the key to his art? I think it’s his powerful perception. He notices details of behavior and extracts meaning from them. His relationship with his subjects is not unlike that of an analyst to his patient. But he’s not a cold, dispassionate analyst – far from it; he loves his subjects and the show-biz world in which they live. For example, in one of my favorite passages in “Making It Real,” he describes Nichols’s laugh:

Nichols inspects a replay of the just completed scene in which Ben Kingsley, the leader of Shandling’s planet, taps him for the procreative mission. “The success of our planet’s domination of the universe rests in your hands,” Kingsley says, in his gravest British Received Pronunciation. “Now, if you’ll come this way we’ll arrange your transfer and attach your penis.” A big, chesty laugh rumbles through Nichols’s body. “Kingsley was put on earth to say that line,” he says, and laughs some more. Nichols has as many kinds of laughs as he does ironic inflections, but his high-pitched Big Laugh is like no other. His eyes widen, his body stiffens, his pale skin reddens as hilarity crashes over him. In that moment of wipeout, all of Nichols’s power, self-consciousness, and royal command vanish into childish delight. This wheezy collapse has been captured on record (“Nichols and May at Work”); and anyone who has been in its force field knows the strength of its infectiousness. “It’s incredible when you get it,” Neil Simon told me. “It inspires you to show him more material to get it again.”

That “A big, chesty laugh rumbles through Nichols’s body” is inspired! The whole passage is inspired! It gets at a defining aspect of Nichols’s character – his wonderful, crazy sense of humour.