Just three years earlier, she became the second-oldest recipient of a Tony Award for acting for her performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s play “The Waverly Gallery.” How May was lured back to Broadway as an actor, decades after her triumphant 1960-1961 run of “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” is one of the exceedingly entertaining stories that Carrie Courogen chronicles in her splendid book, “Miss May Does Not Exist.”
The first thing readers may want to know is if the author had access to the legendarily elusive multi-hyphenate whose name still commands hushed and reverent tones in comedy circles. There have been rare sightings. In 2012, May agreed to be interviewed by Vanity Fair alongside Nichols. A decade later, she made her one and (thus far) only podcast appearance on Phil Rosenthal and David Wild’s “Naked Lunch.” This year, she co-hosted an evening of her films on Turner Classic Movies.
But as Courogen writes, “No one, and nothing, can convince her to do anything she doesn’t want to do,” and she did not want to cooperate on a biography of her life. Not that Courogen didn’t try: In an amusing prologue, she writes that she “mailed her postcards, messengered her cookies, established regular contact with her de facto consigliere, talked to some of her best friends. I spent $200 printing and mailing her 341 pages of museum scans of old family documents she hadn’t known existed, sent emails that bounced, cold-called numbers that rang endlessly, walked by her building hoping I’d happen to see her coming out of it, attended events she RSVP’d to, then ghosted at the last possible moment.”
An eventual offer from May to answer four questions in writing — with characteristic stipulations — was made and withdrawn.
But “Miss May Does Not Exist” is revelatory scholarship that gives full measure to this artist who, despite obstacles and setbacks (some self-inflicted), is an exalted figure in the comedy pantheon, a distinct voice whose outlier creative life Courogen captures through original research, archival material and scores of interviews with those in the privileged orbit of the May-verse (the book contains 44 pages of footnotes).
Very little in May’s life, career and comedy is conventional. She had, Courogen writes, an erratic upbringing and an eccentric family. She was born in 1932, the daughter of an itinerant player in Yiddish theater. It was at the University of Chicago where she found the best expression of her voice with improv pioneers the Compass Players, the forerunner to Second City. She also found Nichols, with whom she would collaborate on and off the stage until his death in 2014. But were they lovers or not? May’s response to that question: “We were lovers or not.”
Courogen does an excellent job of contextualizing May’s work with Compass and Nichols to convey just how game-changing it was. At a time when mostly male stand-up comedians were boffo with the wife and mother-in-law one-liners, May and her generation found comedy in fraught mother-son relationships, sex, adultery, sexual harassment in the workplace, corporate bureaucracy and other thoroughly modern foibles.
A refrain throughout the book is May being told, “You can’t do that.” Refuse to cut an overlong third act that would keep Broadway theatergoers in their seats till 1 a.m.? Write an ultimately censored sketch about network censors that contained the word “breast” for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”? Quit the act when she and Nichols were the toast of Broadway?
Well, in some cases, “they” might have been right, but her refusal to back down to protect the integrity of her work is part and parcel of what makes Elaine Elaine, and her creative battles make up the most compelling portions of the book. “With every movie I have done,” she said, “I may just be a pain the ass.”
May directed a mere four: “A New Leaf” and “The Heartbreak Kid” were commercial and critical hits; the gritty “Mikey and Nicky” is an underseen critic’s darling; and “Ishtar” was an infamous fiasco. Had she been a male director, she would have been given an opportunity to bounce back.
But she was not a male director. When she made “A New Leaf” for Paramount in 1971, it was, Courogen notes, the first major studio film to be directed by a woman since Ida Lupino’s 1966 Hayley Mills comedy, “The Trouble With Angels” (that’s major studio; save your emails, Stephanie Rothman cultists), and the first made at Paramount since Dorothy Arzner’s “Merrily We Go to Hell” in 1932.
So, there would be no “second chances” for May as a director following the ill-received buddy comedy that has enjoyed something of a critical reassessment in recent years.
The stories behind “Ishtar’s” runaway production alone could fill a book, and Courogen separates truth from legend, such as the story about May supposedly ordering underlings to flatten desert dunes. When a friend asked her to confirm that piece of “Ishtar” folklore, May asked him: “Do you believe that?” To which he responded: “Well, no, but it’s such a great story.”
This book has a lot of them! One of the most famous of May at work concerns “Mikey and Nicky,” when the cameraman yelled cut after stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk walked out of frame to end a scene. “Don’t ever cut,” May told him. “They may come back.”
May enjoyed greater success as an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (“Heaven Can Wait,” “Primary Colors”) and script doctor, who, uncredited, came to the rescue of such films as “Reds” and “Tootsie.”
“Miss May Does Not Exist,” like its subject, contains multitudes, and it captures the complexities and contradictions of the fiendishly funny and fiercely independent artist who once said, “The only safe thing is to take a chance.”
Donald Liebenson is an entertainment writer. His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and Vulture, among other publications.
The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
St. Martin’s. 400 pp. $30
