Excerpt adapted fromMike Nichols: A Life(Penguin Press, February 2).
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Says Orson Welles: Nobodys in his league with actors.
But by the mid-1980s, Nichols was on the rise again.
Ephron possessed everyquality Nichols loved in the people closest to him wit, intellectual fluency, strong-mindedness.
She was a Jewish mother whose own Jewish mother had been as formidable and complex as his.
They knew whose marriage was a sham and who could not act and who had a bad drug problem.
And they had words, a torrent of them.
So it was natural that she would entrust him withHeartburn.
Reaction to the novel, which had come out in the spring of 1983, had been explosive.
But the outrage of those who felt repelled or perhaps menaced byHeartburnonly helped speed it to the best-seller list.
The book is just like her its very clever.
Nichols himself was a signatory to the final settlement.
Nichols did not viewHeartburnas an act of betrayal but as a response to one.
Mike, at that time, was a romantic and a total womanizer, saysHeartburns producer, Robert Greenhut.
But what he felt for Streep was love and respect.
He listened to her.
Mandy was at the top of his game, says Juliet Taylor, the films casting director.
We were all just dying and thinking,Oh, he is going to be so high-maintenance.
DuringHeartburns two weeks of rehearsal, Nichols started to worry.
Many of Patinkins questions seemed to emanate from his skepticism about the bad behavior of his character.
Mandy would constantly say, I dont know.
Would a guy really do this?
Would a man really cheat on his wife while she was pregnant?
says Richard Masur, who played one of Rachels friends.
[Mandy] never got it.
Mandys a questioner, right?
Hes a rabbinical actor.
He wears everyone down with questions, and thats how he solves the mystery of the thing for himself.
They shot for five days.
Both actors thought everything was hunky-dory, says Greenhut.
But soon after filming a restaurant scene, Nichols told him, This is not happening.
I think we should try and replace Mandy.
He couldnt even articulate what it was, except that there was no real excitement in the relationship.
We sat in my car I had one of the first car phones.
I said, You call him, and Ill sit here and hold your hand or whatever.
It was a very emotional experience for both of them.
I sat next to Mike, and I could hear Mandy gasp on the other end.
Nichols had not told her of his decision, and, she says, I never really understood it.
He just took a dislike.
Mandy was wonderful, and it was so early in the shoot.
I did say to Mike, I think its a bad idea.
And it was so sudden!
Just like shaking an Etch A Sketch, and he was gone.
and said that he was ambivalent about the role and believed that Nichols had always wanted another actor.
But he was devastated.
Ive felt awful about it all my life, Nichols said.
But on film, I couldnt see the chemistry I wanted.
I had to move fast.
Unless he could get a new co-star for Streep on a moments notice, the production would shut down.
Then comes the bill, and its very high, but thats also part of If you needme.
Both Streep and Ephron worried that Nicholsons arrival would throwHeartburnout of balance.
Now everyone will like him, that son of a bitch, Ephron fretted.
It was a unique opportunity to explore things fromherperspective, from Noras perspective.
Nicholsons hiring was the first time in my life that I got mad at Mike.
I went to Mike and said, This movie is about the person who got hit by the bus.
Its not about the bus.
He heard me he really did hear me on that.
And all the nonsense about new scenes stopped.
Nicholson himself turned out to be nervous.
He and Streep had never met, and there was no prep time before their first scene.
If you look at the movie, Meryls doing that thing that girls do, he said.
Shes blotchy parts of her face are blushing.
For the first time, he started to take pleasure in the shoot.
It became clear to me that it was at least alive, he said.
I dont know how to narrow it down any more.
Nora was always there, says Streep.
He and she were the Gang of Two.
And often they didnt even have to say much there was so much between them that was understood.
Nicholson couldnt have been happier.
But with women, he was engaged, connected, funny.
He didnt have a father to kill.
Their scenes inHeartburnwere the first he ever shot with a fathers eye.
To fill in her own performance, Streep watched Ephron every day.
For Nichols, the making ofHeartburnbecame a more personal experience than he had expected, sometimes uncomfortably so.
The cast was full of people he knew Maureen Stapleton, Stockard Channing, Cynthia ONeal, Milos Forman.
In most of his movies, he had embedded a thematic statement somewhere in the first five minutes.
During one of those sessions, when Greenhut was working with Nichols,60 Minutescame on TV in the background.
Nichols lifted his head from the shooting schedule, looked at Diane Sawyer, and said, Wow.
How can I get to meet her?
Youre a famous guy, Greenhut told him.
Im sure you’ve got the option to figure it out.
What followed was, he said, the year I went crazy.
It took months for the people who knew Nichols to realize that he was having a nervous breakdown.
A degree of emotional unsteadiness was only natural.
But the pending reception ofHeartburnfelt more ominous.
Its hard to forget what everybody said and go back and cut the picture right.
That night, he was rattled.
It was clear it hadnt gone well, and nobody wanted to talk about the movie.
I need a lot.
He just seemed so bereft and alone, more than I had ever seen.
WhenHeartburnopenedin July, a more widespread negative verdict came in.
InTime,Richard Corliss sighed over the tunnel-vision point of view of the offended party.
Tired of her cuddly, smart-homebody personality?
He had always worried about money, particularly when it stopped flowing.
One night, he called Tom Stoppard and said, Could I come and live with you?
Will you take care of me?
On another, he called Stephen Sondheim.
I thought,What am I hearing?
Mike is having some kind of paranoid break.I didnt tell anybody because I didnt know who I would tell.
I just said, Mike, I think, I really think … are you seeing a psychiatrist?
He said, Oh, yeah, yeah.
I thought it was just his usual strangeness about money.
In those days,millionairemeantbillionaire.And I thought,Wow.I knew he liked money and luxury goods and living high.
But it was a question people who knew Nichols were starting to ask.
Some took him at his word, as irrational as he sounded.
He called me one night and said, A terrible thing has happened.
Ive lost all my money, and I have nothing, Streep recalls.
I said, Well, Mike, you have so many rich friends everybodys going to lend you money.
I thought,Somethings wrong with him,but I didnt know what.
By the mid-1980s, cocaine was so ubiquitous in Nicholss professional circles that its use barely raised an eyebrow.
Nichols had been using cocaine regularly for some time and had been known to use crack, too.
He later said his drug use had contributed to his heart attack.
Im the kind of person who never knows about that, she says.
She talked to him and said, Hes out of his mind.
When she said it, I thought she was imagining it because she always thought everybody was using.
But she was right.
This time, the problem wasnt cocaine.
The pill worked for a while and then it didnt.
At first, I was enormously depressed, he said.
Then I was delusional.
I thought I was broke.
And I made hideous mistakes.
He started selling everything, often at cut-rate prices to the first available buyer.
He fired his driver and got rid of his Mercedes.
He would compulsively go over a list of his assets.
He really did have debt, Bergen says.
He lived like a prince.
That October, his friend Susan Forristal came to visit him in Connecticut.
I said, What are you taking to sleep?
And he said, Im taking Halcion.
The summer before, I had been in Amagansett with Randy Newman and Penny Marshall.
Penny was saying, I just want to kill myself.
And Randy said, What are you taking to sleep?
And she said, Halcion.
And he went, Exactly the same thing happened to me and my brother.
And I said, Im telling you: Its not fine.
So then we had the weekend.
They had people over for lunch, and the kids were causing trouble, and it was just normal.
A few weeks later, Nichols asked Forristal to come to the Carlyle.
It became clear that he was trying to figure out the most painless way to take his own life.
They got him dressed, hailed a taxi, and took him to Columbia-Presbyterian.
The crisis was over, but the aftershocks were considerable.
(In craziness, he once observed, a fair amount of truth comes out.)
Their parting was amicable.
I changed my life, he said.
I wanted another life.
And I got it.
After that six months of hell, my life was very different, he said.
Slowly, what youre doing is turning into stone.
And then you think youre through.
Their meeting was an accident.
And youre mine, she replied.
They didnt banter; they opened up to each other quickly, finding common ground at a vulnerable moment.
Nothing fundamental had changed, she says.
But in the first 90 seconds, I knew he was at the center of the dance.
Nichols was still married; Sawyer was involved with the diplomat Richard Holbrooke.
she asked as they reached New York.
He said he did.
They exchanged pleasantries and went their separate ways.
Im going to marry her.
She had wondered what had happened to me, he said, and was sort of hurt.
Nevertheless, she agreed to have lunch with him.
And then it went very, very fast, he said.
In less than a month, they were engaged.
(Silkwoodis another.)
I cant understand what all the carping was about.
Excerpt adapted fromMike Nichols: A Life,by Mark Harris.
Copyright 2021 by Mark Harris.
To be published by Penguin Press.
Reproduced by permission of the Wylie Agency.
