ELAINE MAY DIDN’T SET OUT to become a director. What she really wanted to do was write. Her first film, A New Leaf, came about partly because it was 1968 and Paramount knew it would look good to hire a woman director. And partly because May wouldn’t sell her script without being guaranteed director approval—the only way to ensure her work didn’t get turned into something else entirely. The studio said no but told her she could direct the film herself; they also wouldn’t let her cast the female lead, but the part was hers if she wanted it. As May tells it, she had been offered $200,000 for the script alone, but as writer-director-star, she received just a quarter of the original fee. “You can’t expect to get that much the first time you direct,” her manager explained. Charles Bluhdorn, the industrialist who owned Paramount, told May that he was going to make her the next Ida Lupino. On the first day of shooting, when the crew asked May where she wanted the camera, she couldn’t find it. “I began sort of on one foot,” May remembered, “and just continued that way.” It was a fitting start for a woman who had become famous for improvising.
Ten years earlier, May and her collaborator Mike Nichols had become known for advancing what was then a sly and provocative new style of comedy. She was twenty-five and considered the real engine of their act, which they had developed at the University of Chicago in the improvisational-theater scene. Nichols and May didn’t rely on one-liners or put-downs or caricatures. Instead, they offered audiences a chance to notice the humor in regular people and situations—like telephone operators and PTA meetings—and in things that you weren’t supposed to make fun of in the 1950s, like sex and adultery and the high cost of having a funeral. They also made the most of the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. One of their best-known vignettes involves two teenagers on a first date negotiating how far she will let him go. “I would respect you like crazy,” he says, shaking his bowed head for emphasis. “You can’t even imagine how I would respect you.” Not yet convinced, she asks: “Well, I mean, are you sure you wouldn’t just be grateful?” There were funny lines, but you couldn’t stand and deliver a Nichols and May joke—the entire narrative was the joke.
To come up with new material, May would set the terms of the scene and throw wrenches if necessary to keep things interesting, and Nichols, who was better at knowing when to move on from a beat or change tack, would set its rhythms. Their process is often compared to that of a wildly prolific writer and a canny editor; if she wasn’t stopped, May would go on forever. Their longest and darkest sketch, never filmed or recorded, was a game of brinksmanship inspired by the Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello. It began with Nichols and May playing children having a burping contest, who then start pretending they’re Mommy and Daddy having a grown-up fight. At some point, the pretense that they were children fell away, and they would step into the roles of bickering parents, which would then give way to the performers playing exaggerated versions of themselves hurling personal attacks back and forth until May’s character called Nichols’s character impotent. He would walk offstage. Sometimes he would come back for one more cruel word; she would turn away, he would tear her blouse, she would cry, and then they would turn together to face the audience, say, “This is Pirandello!” and bow. The audience wouldn’t know quite how to respond.
ELAINE BERLIN WAS BORN in 1932 in Philadelphia, not Chicago, as she sometimes used to claim. This is one of the first things Carrie Courogen sets straight in her biography Miss May Does Not Exist. May’s father, Jack Berlin, was a performer in the Yiddish theater; sometimes young Elaine would perform small parts alongside him. Jack found some success in radio, but was never as famous as his older sister, the actress Mollie Cohn. May’s mother, Ida, managed Jack’s business and believed in his talent, but her mother-in-law hated her and once told a group of actors that she would be “the happiest woman in the world” if her son were to divorce Ida. (Courogen doesn’t say so, but I’m sure she includes this detail for how it echoes the schadenfreude in Nichols and May’s sketch about a nagging mother and her rocket-scientist son. He apologizes for not calling more often: “I feel awful.” Her reply: “Oh honey, if I could believe that I’d be the happiest mother in the world.”) After Jack died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1942, Ida and Elaine, who had been staying in Chicago as Jack traveled for work, moved in with Ida’s brother, who had friends and associates in the mob. Not long after, he moved the family to Los Angeles.
May is said to have attended fifty different schools by the time she was ten. She dropped out at fourteen, bored of everything except diagramming sentences. At sixteen, she married a former schoolmate—the future toy inventor and manufacturer of waterbed accessories Marvin May—and had her daughter, Jeannie, at seventeen. When the marriage failed, May returned to her mother’s home and found work as a roofing saleswoman and as secretary to a private investigator who once “literally chased me around the desk.” Sometime in the early ’50s, May showed up in the renowned acting teacher Maria Ouspenskaya’s class. One day, students were asked to perform the transformation of a seedling to a sapling to a fully foliaged tree. “I couldn’t bud to save my life,” May remembered. “I knew I wasn’t a tree.” In 1952, she left Jeannie in Ida’s care and hitchhiked to the University of Chicago. She never officially enrolled but started fights over philosophy, survived on apples and hamburgers, and terrified coeds with her beauty and intellect. In 1954, she and Nichols—who previously did not get along despite both having earned reputations on campus for being snobbish and judgmental—found that they kept up with each other better than anyone else.
In fall 1957, they left Chicago for New York and called up the talent manager Jack Rollins. At their meeting, they asked Rollins to provide a first line and a last line, and then they improvised a scene in between. “I thought, ‘My god, these are two people writing hilarious comedy on their feet,’” Rollins remembered. He signed them the next day, and soon they were opening in nightclubs and making guest appearances on television. “Everyone had said to Rollins, ‘Nobody will get them, they’re too intellectual,’” May remembered. But early in 1958, after performing on an NBC primetime special, “everybody got us.” Nichols bought a duplex and May moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive, where she had Jeannie and Ida join her. Less than a year after Nichols and May arrived in the city practically broke, they were turning down lucrative offers, like one from Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who wanted them to costar in a sitcom. Instead, they developed new material for NBC’s radio show Monitor, released their first two comedy albums, and in 1960 opened An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May on Broadway. The show was a big success, but in 1961, May walked away because she couldn’t stand doing the same thing night after night.
Three years later, Nichols won his first Tony for directing Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park; a couple years after that, he directed his first film, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and the following year he made The Graduate, for which he received his first Oscar in 1968. It’s not particularly illuminating to compare May to her former partner, who was in many ways her opposite twin, her more gregarious and eager-to-please shadow (“Elaine and I are, in some weird way, each other’s unconscious,” Nichols reflected in a 2000 profile), but this period was filled with disappointments and false starts for May. Her one-act Not Enough Rope, about a suicidal woman who didn’t think ahead, was dismissed by critics. A Matter of Position, her play about a needy man who refuses to get out of bed for a year, closed during its out-of-town tryout and led to a yearslong estrangement between her and Nichols, who played the lead and seemed to be its inspiration. A sitcom about two old ladies running a boardinghouse for newly released convicts was never made, apparently because May was never happy with her script. Another show idea was killed because May was determined to have forty-five-minute-long episodes, and the network told her it couldn’t be done. “That’s irrational,” she said. “It should be what it should be.”
Her second marriage, in 1962 to Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick, was brief. As Harnick told Nichols’s biographer Mark Harris: “Elaine and I were never married—well, yes, we were, my goodness! It was very unfortunate. She initiated divorce proceedings a couple of months later.” The press was eager to hear from May when she married her psychoanalyst, David Rubinfine—very 1963. “Why don’t you just say I’m married to a doctor?” she suggested. He had left his wife, with whom he had three daughters, around the same time May filed for divorce. Rubinfine’s wife killed herself the spring after he left, and May and Rubinfine were married six weeks later. Suddenly May had three grieving stepdaughters and teenage Jeannie to care for. As Courogen tells it, May stayed relatively busy with her own work during this period, sometimes welcoming the distractions of domestic life, sometimes holed up with her writing behind closed doors, and on one occasion inviting the JFK assassination truther Mark Lane to the stage of the Third Ear, the improv revue she ran.
When May’s first film role was announced, Nichols commented: “Elaine is going to suffer in Hollywood. She must have complete control of a given situation. Out there she will be at the mercy of many people.” May declined to participate in Miss May Does Not Exist, and the portrait of her that emerges here is at the mercy of her former colleagues, friends, countless journalists, and of course Courogen herself, who spoke with forty-six sources—most of them men, notably the playwright Kenneth Lonergan and May’s close friends and collaborators Phillip Schopper and Julian Schlossberg. But the most forceful testimonies in the book were given years ago: “Elaine May makes Hitler look like a little librarian,” her New Leaf costar Walter Matthau once said. “She can literally do anything she wants. Give her five minutes, and she’ll master it.” One of her ex-boyfriends: “She treated everything funny that men take seriously.” Mark Gordon, a peer from her Chicago theater days: “Elaine didn’t give a shit if the audience didn’t like her work.” Former head of Paramount Barry Diller: “She is a brilliant woman, and a wonderful woman, but she can go to jail or the madhouse for ten years before I will submit to blackmail!”
Courogen says her piece in a short prologue. She takes us back to one “crisp Tuesday evening in September.” She is sitting on a bench on Central Park West across the street from the San Remo building—where the ninety-two-year-old May has lived since 1981—trying to “subtly adjust the too-tight long blond wig on my head.” This is a stakeout. The author explains her cunning disguise: “You see, I am just as scared of being recognized by Elaine as she maybe is of me.” Why May would recognize someone she’s never met is beyond me, but this is beside the point, which is that Courogen wants us to know that she has tried everything she could think of to gain access to her subject. Courogen clearly feels seen by May. She dedicates her book to “difficult girls,” calls her subject “Elaine,” and is as familiar as May is reticent, writing in a casual yet demonstrative manner about May’s “flop eras,” her “best self,” and her “irreverent badassery.” (May is widely understood to have orchestrated the smuggling across state lines of two crucial reels from her 1976 film Mikey and Nicky, which she later used as leverage to win back control over the film when Paramount seemed poised to take over the final cut. “Why should I be loyal to a big mountain with some stars around it?” she may or may not have said.)
Obsessional bona fides established, Courogen characterizes May as a paranoid genius who trusts few and is most comfortable “remaining unknowable, seen but never truly seen.” In addition to May’s preference for privacy, this assessment is based on her early habit of giving false answers to interviewers after she realized that some of them were simply not listening, on her seeming unbothered by the apocryphal stories that circle her and her work (most famously that she had sand dunes flattened during the shooting of her 1987 film, the unjustly maligned Ishtar), on her refusal to take credit for screenwriting and script-doctoring work on films not directed by Nichols (or, just once, by Warren Beatty), and on the fact that when she does appear in print or in public, she typically plays up a press-averse persona. May has a sense of humor about all this. In a promotional video for acting coach Sandra Seacat’s only film, 1990’s wonky and jubilant In the Spirit (which May starred in and, Courogen shows, effectively took over as director and editor), May’s darkened silhouette appears above her clearly displayed name. “I’m willing to talk about the film,” the figure says, “but I don’t want to be identified.”
To Courogen, May’s unserious attitude toward publicity and straight facts is evidence of her preference “for selective participation in the real world.” But seen another way, May’s terms of engagement perfectly represent the woman who once told an audience, “To actually make something that isn’t boring is kind of hard to do.” In her determination to make an earnest woman out of May, Courogen gets scoops like the one she opens chapter ten with: “It was all but inevitable that she would absolutely steamroll you at Scrabble—which she rarely played without scoring a near-impossible 50-point word—but you’d play against her anyway, partly for the thrill of watching her win.” It’s worth mentioning that Miss May Does Not Exist would be a very different book without the second person, which Courogen uses regularly to speculate about her subject’s state of mind. When “you” or “your” appear, brace for insight: “Allowing your true self to be known, really seen—there couldn’t be anything more terrifying than letting much more than a very select few into the soft and vulnerable parts of yourself. It’s too dangerous.”
Time published a profile titled “Whatever Happened to Elaine May?” in 1967, the same year she appeared in Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing and Clive Donner’s Luv. “Not even The New York Times could convince her to do a sit-down” to promote the latter film, Courogen comments. Instead, May interviewed herself for the Times, using the byline Kevin M. Johnson. After “Johnson” informs “May” that the time for “frivolous questions” is over, she informs him of a part she has been offered in a “pretty interesting” upcoming adaptation of Sartre’s play No Exit. It’s to be set in Chicago, and the writers have made a few other changes:
In the movie they’re not dead. In the movie they’re all looking for the same apartment because they know it’s vacant and the last tenant, who dies before the movie starts, has left this tremendously valuable painting there disguised as a reproduction. So what you now have is a situation in which three people are held together by mutual distrust—a pretty close bond you’ll admit.
Courogen’s gloss of this section slightly misreads May’s premise, making her a writer of the script instead of an actor considering a role. Either way, the joke is that the Hollywood adaptation is a total perversion of the original. And the deeper joke involves the original narrative: Sartre’s play very famously defines hell as being forever subjected to being seen through the eyes of another—not unlike what happens in an adaptation, an interview, a biography authorized or otherwise.
MAY TURNED IN the script for A New Leaf in 1969. The film was supposed to be a love story in which the man gets away with murder. Walter Matthau plays a middle-aged dandy who, having squandered his trust fund, sees two options: he can kill himself, or he can marry rich and kill his bride. In the script, he kills two people before he begrudgingly accepts that he loves his intended victim, an “enormously wealthy” botanist played by May, and saves her from the death he had planned. May’s cut of the film—now lost—was three and a half hours long and took ten months to edit. Her contract was supposed to guarantee test screenings of her director’s cut, but Paramount denied them because she was expected to have edited the film in sixteen weeks. The studio took over the edit and axed the murders. “They cut out exactly what you wrote the thing for,” May said. “They know somehow.” She sued to get her name off the film, arguing that it had been so fundamentally transformed that it was more Paramount’s than hers, and that use of her name was “willful misrepresentation and damaging to her reputation.” According to one of the film’s producers, the judge on the case asked to see the studio’s cut, loved it, and told him, “You guys win.”
With The Heartbreak Kid, May was her own worst nightmare: the director-for-hire who transformed a writer’s script. Neil Simon’s screenplay about a newlywed dastard who falls over himself for another woman while on his honeymoon was sympathetic to the male character and played every beat for laughs, but May struck a deal with him stipulating that if she filmed every scene exactly as scripted, she could also have her actors improvise. This along with her observational camera and casting choices (Jeannie over Diane Keaton; Charles Grodin over Dustin Hoffman) made the film a detached study of insidious male gall and Jewish assimilation rather than a relatively standard ’70s antiromance about erotic obsession. Putting her name on it was no problem: the title card reading “Neil Simon’s The Heartbreak Kid” is followed by “an Elaine May film.” May doesn’t get enough credit for the script of Mikey and Nicky—her darkest film, starring real-life friends Peter Falk and John Cassavetes as small-time Philadelphia mobsters who grew up together. It’s a common misunderstanding that the film was improvised, seemingly because of Cassavetes’s proximity to the project and on just how real it feels. But May had been working on the story for decades; it was based on her uncle’s friends in the Chicago Syndicate. At one point during shooting, she had a note passed under Cassavetes’s hotel room door: “Elaine says learn the lines.”
Courogen is assiduous on Mikey and Nicky’s stolen reels, its 1.4 million feet of film and two years of editing, and how the whole legal fiasco—May’s second with Paramount—resulted in the studio’s dutifully dumping the film in theaters for just a few days in December 1976. May wouldn’t direct again for eleven years. In the ’80s, she became a renowned script doctor: alongside untold amounts of uncredited work, she saved Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie and Warren Beatty’s Reds and then secured both stars for the 1987 film that effectively put an end to her directorial career. Ishtar follows two talentless singer-songwriters to a fictional Middle Eastern country where a combination of fate and folly leads them to become proxies on either side of a revolution and learn a little something about life, and landing a record deal, along the way. “You look at something one way and it’s a disaster, you look at it another way and it’s humorous,” May once said. “It depends on how you tilt your head.” Ishtar is either a Trojan horse of a movie—a commentary on US foreign policy disguised as farce—or a case of concealing nothing: a commentary that US foreign policy, when seen for what it is, is a farce.
What is not up to interpretation is the fact that the sole woman director working with any major studio in the ’70s was not afforded the right to flop a decade later when Columbia turned on her and Ishtar became synonymous in the press with wasted dollars and directorial hubris and ineptitude. May wouldn’t call it sexist but she has allowed that “the movie was so killed.” In the years since, she has collaborated with Nichols (who once made a film about talking dolphins who are kidnapped as part of a plot to assassinate the president) on The Birdcage and Primary Colors, helped shepherd In the Spirit into existence, returned to writing for the theater with plays and one-acts like Adult Entertainment and Hotline, and allowed herself to be dragged to the Tonys to accept that she had won best actress for her role in the 2019 reprise of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. Her Playbill bio for that show listed several accomplishments and then: “She has done more, but this is enough.”
As for what hasn’t been done, Courogen tells of how May and Stanley Donen—the choreographer and director of Charade and Singin’ in the Rain to whom May was “happily unmarried” for twenty years—worked together from 2003 to about 2013 on what I can’t help but call May’s Megalopolis. According to Benjamin Odell, who was a Columbia grad student when Donen brought him on as producer, her script “was amazing but insane.” Bye Bye Blues would have been a musical feature about an aging director trying to secure funding for a musical feature about an idealistic architect. When the director character is rebuffed because the industry has decided he’s too old to work, he decides to shoot the film independently, hires a crew of film-school students, and casts himself as the architect. A fictionalized Harvey Weinstein agrees to distribute it, but on one condition: when the architect character dies of a heroin overdose at the end of the movie, the director playing the role also has to die—all the better to market the film. At one point, in real life, May and Donen wanted Donen to play the director/architect character and planned to shoot the film with a crew of students.
Given Courogen’s attention to Bye Bye Blues, it’s strange she never mentions that May has reportedly been in development on a project called Crackpot, written by Jeannie and the playwright Mark Hampton, since 2019. Dakota Johnson and Sebastian Stan are attached to star, and Stan recently said that they need a backup director, for insurance reasons, to move ahead. It’s hard to imagine the woman who started directing because she didn’t want anyone to misinterpret her script agreeing to cede control in such a morbid way, but nobody should pretend to know anything about whatever will or won’t happen next. May’s work is at least as much about ignorance as knowingness. While shooting Mikey and Nicky, she kept three cameras rolling simultaneously and had the entire set lit just in case her actors felt like wandering into another room or checking the contents of a pastry case (doughnuts arranged by May personally). One night, after Falk and Cassavetes had walked far out of frame and turned a corner, May’s cameraman decided to call it. “Why did you yell cut?” The writer-director was furious. “They may come back.”
Lizzy Harding is Bookforum’s associate editor.