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.

February 4, 2019 Issue

Sarah Larson, in her excellent “Home on the Range,” in this week’s issue, reviews a revival of Sam Shepard’s 1980 True West, a play I’ve always wanted to see ever since I read John Lahr’s memorable review of it in the March 27, 2000, New Yorker (included in his great 2015 collection, Joy Ride). Lahr called it “a droll tale of sibling rivalry.” That 2000 production starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly. (Reilly is one of my favorite actors; his performance in The Sisters Brothers is, for me, one of 2018’s movie highlights.) What made Lahr’s piece memorable was his description of the play’s action. For example:

When the lights come up on the two brothers in the next scene, Austin is burnishing one of a dozen newly acquired toasters (“There’s gonna’ be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning,” he says); meanwhile, in the foreground, Lee is taking out his writer’s block on the typewriter, smashing it to smithereens with a nine iron. Here Shepard is at his best: loose, intuitive, his dialogue rippling with subtle shifts of mood and ideas. In this impeccably staged piece of slapstick, while Reilly tears up the dining alcove looking for a pencil, Hoffman pads behind him, priming his toasters with white bread and talking about going back to the desert with Lee. “There’s nothing real down here, Lee! Least of all me!” he says. The frenzy builds to a sidesplitting, infantile epiphany. Lee knocks the toast out of Austin’s hand, then as Austin drops to his hands and knees to pick it up, grinds each slice into the floor.

That is a marvelous passage, and what makes it marvelous is its specificity – the burnishing of the toaster, the smashing of the typewriter with a nine iron, the grinding of each slice of toast into the floor.

Edward Sorel, illustration for John Lahr's "True West"

Larson’s piece contains vivid passages, too:

This could be your grandmother’s kitchen. Cherry-print wallpaper, sunny yellows, lush houseplants, decorations approaching kitsch without succumbing to it—everything conveys haimish order and care. There’s love in this room, and it’s about to get torn apart.

Hawke, in a scuzzy trenchcoat, looking convincingly greasy, enjoys himself, at times nearly singing his lines, waving his hands in teasing disdain. But he doesn’t overdo it. 

The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast. 

Josh Cochran, illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the  Range"

Comparing the two pieces, I think I still like Lahr’s the best. But Larson makes a valid point when she says, “Shepard’s writing and his vision are as powerful as ever, but American masculinity has evolved since he wrote ‘True West’; what’s true for one generation may not be true for the next.”

March 31, 2014 Issue

Reading John Lahr’s superb “Joy Ride,” a profile of the director and choreographer Susan Stroman, in this week’s issue, I found myself wondering what Roseanne Barr would make of Stroman’s “ring-a-ding smile,” her “tapping into joy,” and her “turn to the musical as her own Rx for heartbreak.” Roseanne is the subject of Lahr’s masterpiece “Dealing with Roseanne” (The New Yorker, July 17, 1995; included in his wonderful 2002 collection Show and Tell), one of the most brilliant profiles ever to appear in the magazine. “Rage is Roseanne’s ozone. She exudes it. She creates it,” Lahr says. Would Roseanne have catered to Woody Allen’s taste for Snickers bars, as Stroman does in “Joy Ride” (“Stroman, who looked tired, set out two Snickers bars for him”)? I don’t think so, not unless she was on Prozac. Stroman’s escapist world of skittering chorus girls, dancing hotdogs, and sprung chairs is completely different from Roseanne’s hard reality. In “Dealing with Roseanne,” Roseanne says of working-class women, “They don’t kowtow to men like middle-class women do.” But maybe Stroman has an inner Roseanne that she keeps well suppressed? We catch a glimpse of her subversive side when she instructs her dancers, “Kiss with the middle finger.” Now that’s a gesture Roseanne would appreciate.

Even though these two vivid portraits differ from each other in subject, their structures are similar. They both describe the process of creating a show. I relish this form of profile. Nobody does it better than Lahr. In “Dealing with Roseanne,” he takes us into Roseanne’s studio, where we see the first reading of one of her show’s scripts and later look in on one of the “joke rooms” in the writers’ compound, where the writers focus “on the last of their jokes to beat.” In “Joy Ride,” we’re thrillingly present for various stages of Bullets Over Broadway’s production, including the first day of work (“The handouts sat on a Formica table at the entrance to the rehearsal hall, beside a set of black script binders, fanned out flamboyantly like a royal straight flush”), the “meet and greet” (“a ritual of Broadway that is a cross between a kaffeeklatsch, a pep rally, and a shareholders’ meeting”), and the first preview (“At the curtain call, Allen rushed up the stairs toward his private room, but paused at the top. There, alone in the low amber light, he bent over the balustrade to gaze at the crowd standing to applaud. For a full minute, he studied the jubilation, then finally slipped away”). “Joy Ride” is a great addition to Lahr’s magnificent oeuvre. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Also in this week’s issue, Amelia Lester scores another inspired sentence with “If you feel like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night in silent rebuke” (“Bar Tab: Wallflower”).

March 26, 2012 Issue

This week, in the magazine, Judith Thurman and John Lahr revisit the subjects of two of their finest New Yorker pieces. Judith Thurman, in her “Radical Chic” writes about a Prada and Schiaparelli joint retrospective that opens in May at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and John Lahr, in his “Lives In Limbo,” reviews Mike Nichols’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Thurman previously wrote about Schiaparelli in her “Mother of Invention” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2003; included in her 2007 collection Cleopatra’s Nose). Lahr wrote about Death of a Salesman in his “Making Willy Loman” (The New Yorker, January 25, 1999; included in his 2000 collection Show and Tell). It’s interesting to compare their earlier pieces with what they’ve written now.

In “Radical Chic,” Thurman executes a number of minor variations on her earlier “Mother of Invention.” For example, “vagina-shaped fedora” is now “cocktail hats in the shape of a lamb chop, a high-heeled shoe, and a vagina.” “Tree bark rayon” has become “barklike crumpled silk.” And “swagger,” which was previously used in the phrase “racy swagger of the stars,” is repurposed in the new piece to form part of Thurman’s description of Schiaparelli’s “hard chic” (“the swagger of her broad-shouldered suits, the rawness of her furs and embroidery, and a tough attitude toward any simpering or mincing in fashion”). The most interesting variance between the two pieces is Thurman’s redeployment of “scarlet-clawed.” In “Mother of Invention,” “scarlet-clawed” occurs in this delightful line:

Joan Crawford brought her Schiaparellis back to Hollywood and threw them like a gauntlet at Adrian, who made their linebacker shoulders and lavish embellishment his own trademarks, and those of nearly every sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties.

In “Radical Chic,” “scarlet-clawed” is clipped from Joan Crawford and attached to Wallis Simpson:

Dali had painted the skirt with a bright-red lobster, which matched its cummerbund, and Cecil Beaton photographed the future Duchess wearing it serenely, despite – or perhaps to mock – her reputation as a scarlet-clawed predator.

Comparing the two pieces, I think I prefer “Mother of Invention,” mainly because it contains that great “sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties” line. Both articles are beauties.

Turning now to Lahr’s two “Death of a Salesman” pieces, I remember reading “Making Willy Loman,” when it first appeared in the magazine, and finding it fascinating. It describes how Miller came to write Death of a Salesman, the cabin he wrote it in, and his notebook for the play that “soon becomes an expansive, exact handwritten log of Miller’s contact with his inner voices.” I devoured Lahr’s quotations from the notebook and his descriptions of Miller’s use of them, e.g., “Here, as in all his notes for the play, Miller’s passion and his flow are apparent in the surprising absence of cross-outs; the pages exude a startling alertness.”

In “Making Willy Loman,” Lahr shows Miller’s method of composition. He traces the origins of Death of a Salesman back to Miller’s youth. He shows the use Miller made of seemingly stray material (e.g., the moment in 1947 when Miller’s uncle Manny Newman accosted him in the lobby of a theatre). But his interpretation of the play, as a dissection of “cultural envy in action,” strikes me as too brutally reductive. I much prefer the construction he puts forward in his new piece, “Lives In Limbo,” in which he says:

The revelation of this production – drawn out by Nichols’s seamless and limpid orchestration of Willy’s disconcerting flights of imagination (Miller’s original title for the play was “The Inside of His Head”) – is that Willy, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes, and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life, a kind of living ghost. It is existence, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy.

A kind of living ghost. This is an interpretation of Willy Loman’s character that speaks to me. Lahr’s “Lives In Limbo” is a wonderful companion to his memorable “Making Willy Loman.” Both pieces are brilliant!

November 7, 2011 Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Ian Frazier’s wonderful “History Lesson” (“One of the young men from O.W.S. – the one who said they would never leave – was wearing a dark suit jacket, a white shirt, a burgundy tie, a bolo string tie, a beaded Indian necklace, and a silver pendant. On his head he had a wildly multicolored baseball cap, set sideways. His hair was a braided ponytail. His trousers were skin-tight leggings, also multicolored, and he had beige flip-flops on his feet”), John Lahr’s superb “The Natural” (“Her excitement made her luminous”), James Wood’s “Shelf Life,” with its short, rhythmic, three-beat sentences (“I found him hard to love, easier to admire, and I rather feared him”; “I knew he would say it, hated him for it, agreed with him”) and breathtaking, long, loaded-up lines (“His Algerian childhood, his intellectual ambition, the diversion of that ambition into run-of-the-mill moneymaking, his isolation and estrangement in America, his confidence and shyness, pugilism and anxiety, the drinking and the anger and the passion and the pressurized conformity of his businesslike existence: of course, in some general way, these thousands of volumes – neatly systematic, proudly comprehensive – incarnated the shape of this life, but not the facets of his character”); the enticing, exquisite opening sentence of Peter Schjeldahl’s “Old and New” (“Fourteen lamps hanging, aglow, beckon you to an entrance to the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic wing, which is open again after eight years of expansion and renovation”) – the most piquant is the glorious descriptive power of D. T. Max’s “Her Way,” a profile of the pianist Hélène Grimaud. Here, for example, is Max’s description of Grimaud’s hair: “On album covers, her hair telegraphs a mood. It is pinned up in a Clara Schumann-like bun for a Brahms recording, and on the cover of “Credo” – a CD of Beethoven and a pair of mystic-minded modern composers – it is tucked behind her ears, in wan, heroin-chic strands. Ordinarily, her hair is shaggy, with too-busy-to-blow-dry bangs.” And here is his image of her at the keyboard: “Grimaud opened with Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor, playing it as if she were lashing a carriage down the streets of Salzburg.” And here is his rendition of the sound of wolves howling: “Two Mexican wolves, in a nearby enclosure, joined in, several tones higher, glissando-ing down while the red wolves added a frenzied pizzicato.” Grimaud is an outstandingly great subject, and Max’s profile of her is commensurately outstandingly great. It’s incredible color, nuance, and texture reminds me of Kenneth Tynan’s piece on Johnny Carson (“Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), perhaps the finest profile ever to appear in the magazine. That’s just about the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing.

February 8, 2010 Issue

I read this issue cover to cover. Here’s what I liked most in Goings On About Town (GOAT) and The Talk Of The Town (TOTT): Yola Monakhov's photo of a girl in green tights suspended in golden light, the blurb about Glasslands Gallery (“this charming, skuzzy venue”), the gorgeous pink-and-brown Eric Ogden photo “Gents” (Is that Penelope Cruz peering out of the men’s washroom?), Nick Paumgarten’s Tables For Two review of Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecote (“The heart leaps at the sight of a waitress, tongs in hand, offering an extra helping of fries. Yes, please.”), and John Seabrook’s story about meeting J. D. Salinger. Salinger’s “Nervy girl! Nervy girl” quote in Seabrook’s piece is strangely memorable. What was he really saying? Obviously, Seabrook and his girlfriend interpreted it as less than approving, because they decided to sleep in separate bedrooms.
Moving into the heart of the magazine, I devoured Jon Lee Anderson’s “Neighbor’s Keeper,” a valuable, gritty eyewitness account of what’s happening in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. The articles by Patrick Radden Keefe (“The Trafficker”) and Kelefa Sanneh (“Revelations”) were interesting enough, but neither contained a really inspiring sentence. Radden Keefe accomplishes the essential task of a good New Yorker reporter: he personally enters the frame of his report and shows us what he finds out. When Radden Keefe says, “One day in November, I drove to the headquarters of the D.E.A.’s Special Operations Division, in a generic office park outside Washington, D.C.,” he moves his piece to the level of real journalism. The same cannot be said for Sanneh, who narrates his piece with what Pauline Kael would call "saphead objectivity." Did he actually visit Tonex’s studio in Lemon Grove? Maybe it’s implicit that he did, but he doesn’t actually say so; his “I” doesn’t enter the story, and that’s a failure of the piece, in my humble opinion. I noticed the same failing in Carlo Rotella’s article (“Class Warrior”) in last week’s issue. For me the highlight of the magazine this week is John McPhee’s “The Patch.” I’m an avid reader of McPhee’s writings. I have all his books. “The Patch,” in which McPhee miraculously blends memories of his dying father with pickerel fishing, is among his finest pieces. If you want to know my idea of what an inspired sentence is, here is one from “The Patch”: “In the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space, how did I know it was the same gap?” The specificity of McPhee’s writing is so rich that a sentence, such as the one I just quoted, when lifted from its context, is as gorgeously abstract as anything by DeLillo. The last item in this week’s issue that I wish to comment on is John Lahr’s “The Pathfinder.” Lahr is, in my estimation, a great writer. Even though he moves in and writes about a realm – theatre (or, better still, as Pauline Kael says, theatuh) – that I’m not all that crazy about. I still read him for his glorious writing. His article on the comedian Roseanne Barr (“Queendom Come”) is one of the all-time great New Yorker profiles, right up there with Kenneth Tynan’s Johnny Carson piece (“Fifteen Years of the Salto Motale”). I found “The Pathfinder” stimulating. When Lahr writes that “His [Shepard’s] pieces were abstract flights of illuminated feeling, like the work of the jazz greats – Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Nina Simone – he heard at the Village Gate, more vectors of energy than maps of psychology,” he whets my appetite for a viewing of one of Shepard’s plays. I mean, hey! I love Monk and Mulligan. Maybe Shepard’s work is the crowbar I need to open my mind to the theatuh. My final comment this week is with regard to Mark Doty’s poem “Pescadero,” which I found delightful. Many years ago, Doty’s work was the target of one of Helen Vendler’s cruelest New Yorker reviews (“Comic and Elegiac,” April 8, 1996). Vendler comparatively analyzed two books of poetry, one by August Kleinzahler (“Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow”) and the other by Doty (“Atlantis”). She quickly lets us know which poet she prefers: “Kleinzahler’s poems seem to me far more lively on the page than Doty’s.” She says, “Mark Doty can perform an accomplished description … but then he wants to sermonize.” Of one of his poems, she says his rhythm “seems inert.” She refers to “Doty’s plaintive didacticism.” And she concludes: Kleinzahler’s approach is “the better choice.” I’d never seen two poets compared like this before, one chosen, one rejected. I found myself feeling sorry for Doty, who is the author of one of my favorite New Yorker poems, “A Green Crab’s Shell” (September 11, 1995). But Doty didn’t let Vendler’s attack get to him. He continued to write, and in 2008 won a National Book Award for “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.” “Pescadero” is a description of goats (“The little goats like my mouth and fingers, / and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board / a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field, / pushes her mouth forward to my mouth, / so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her teeth, / and the bristle-whiskers”). I love writing like this. It’s like a highly detailed journalistic fragment or snapshot that Doty lets stand as a portrait in miniature of life in the California town named in the poem’s title. Such a profusion of good things in this issue! But I will have to leave it at that for now.