A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971).
The prologue of Carrie Courogen’s Miss May Does Not Exist details her quest to interview the deliberately enigmatic, fiercely private filmmaker Elaine May. Courogen is a self-professed fan who has penned the first proper biography of the auteur, a task complicated by the fact that May makes a habit of avoiding most interviews. In the end, Courogen’s requests proved fruitless, though she went so far as to stake out May’s New York apartment building in a cheap blonde wig, a scenario straight out of one of May’s sketches, plays, or films.
“You can’t help but love her for remaining silent,” Courogen writes; “speaking would change the narrative, would go against everything she appears to stand for. (And even if she did, how much could we really trust what she told us?) Her voluntary absence, her unwillingness to alter her behavior, isn’t just perfectly her, isn’t just truthful. It’s comedy.”
Comedy is more than a trade for May; it’s an ethos, a lens through which to interpret life, stripping it down to unassailable truths and laughing in its face. When she did speak to the press, May would famously exaggerate details of her biography—her life was just another story that could be punched up and thus made even more interesting, and somehow even truer. Courogen ultimately adopts this mendacity as a through line for her book, warily balancing the mythos and the pathos of May through a mix of first- and secondhand sources. Even as the book grounds May’s lore in research, it respects the mystique that has proven crucial to her sense of humor.
May’s childhood was spent on the road, traveling with her parents’ Yiddish vaudeville troupe (something similar can be said of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton). Her all-around unconventional upbringing included not much in the way of schooling until her father died when May was ten. That’s the way May told the story, and Courogen repeats it, with the caveat that May would later disavow much of her early biographical information as the product of her own “idle inventions” to the press, as she later told film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. We know, at least, that at the age of sixteen she married Marvin May, a toy inventor, in Los Angeles, and at seventeen gave birth to a daughter, Jeannie (who bears May’s maiden name, Berlin). The marriage didn’t last, and when May was twenty years old, she moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, where her mother was from, and where she had sometimes lived as a child. Though she never officially enrolled at the University of Chicago, she sporadically audited classes and used her free time to write plays. It was in Chicago that she would meet Mike Nichols, which is where the mythology of May really begins.
Elaine May and Mike Nichols in a publicity still for The Fabulous Fifties (1960).
It’s an irony that I’m sure May appreciates: until recently, her critical reputation as a filmmaker was uneven, though she had achieved great early success as an improvisational comedian with Nichols and later as a screenwriter. Courogen details their humble, bohemian foundation in the mid-1950s Chicago theater scene, where May was involved in improv and sketch comedy; she helped to establish these modes while writing premises for Chicago’s Compass Players, which would evolve into Second City (would we have Saturday Night Live without her?). Within a couple of years, the pair had made the leap to New York, where they exploded onto the nightclub circuit.
Courogen emphasizes the duo’s collaborative working style, though that risks obscuring May’s particular talents. May’s genius was obvious to anyone who met her, as many quoted sources attest, but she wasn’t necessarily an instant success in her own right. In 1954, she directed a production of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie that was termed “a disaster,” and fellow Compass Players member Mark Gordon remembers, “There was never a recognition that Elaine’s stuff was fantastic,” though this lack of either an auspicious beginning or an ecstatic response didn’t hold her back. Rather, she was an iconoclast in the making. Of the two, Nichols was more interested in pursuing conventional success. May, as Courogen emphasizes throughout, had an uneasy relationship with fame and attention.
Success proved to be oppressive to her ongoing desire to create. “Pretty quickly, the work it takes to maintain it replaces the work you did to earn it,” Courogen writes. Indeed, the duo’s Broadway show, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which they performed more than 300 times over the course of a single year, was extremely successful, but it was also deeply repetitive and unstimulating for May, a hindrance to her evolving creative sensibility. “She resented the need ‘to start pleasing this tremendous unknown audience,’” Courogen notes, quoting May, “where ‘you can only use safe material. But the only subject that’s really safe is parking—and there’s just so much you can say about parking.’” Courogen has a flair for illuminating the often inane, often searing subject matter that ultimately set May’s interests apart from the prosaic tastes of her comedic peers; one of her more successful stage endeavors involved a woman calling into a suicide hotline and facing continual obstructions to receiving help.
May, boldly renouncing such success in a way that many artists are not brave enough to do, decided to leave, and the next year she and Nichols—who was on the verge of achieving a level of prestige in stage and film direction that would eventually eclipse their combined renown—dissolved their partnership. Though their initial split was not entirely acrimonious, the two later became estranged, but they would find their way back to one another and collaborate sporadically—and propitiously—until Nichols’s death in 2014. Courogen honors May’s relationship with Nichols without overemphasizing its importance, nor does she oversimplify the gendered aspects of their respective journeys toward success. She dedicates the book to “difficult girls,” using an adjective often applied to May; early on, Courogen examines how that stereotype is “a death sentence if you’re a woman,” and throughout the book, she illuminates the variety of ways May actually was difficult and also the ways she was merely perceived as being so. Courogen writes of May’s predicament as she prepared to direct her first feature, A New Leaf (1971), when she had no filmmaking experience or inclination toward leadership: “Behave in too feminine a manner, and you’re perpetuating the stereotype that to be feminine is to be weak, confirming the notion that women couldn’t direct, after all. But behave like a man, and you’re a traitor to your gender, perpetuating the patriarchal belief that masculinity reigns supreme, that you can’t be womanly and qualified at the same time.” May only knew how to be herself—whether as a novice grasping for footing in the dark or as an authoritarian genius unwilling to compromise her vision. Her so-called “difficulty” wasn’t confined to any one phase of her career; she was thought of as difficult both at the outset, when she knew nothing, and later, when she knew everything, always uncompromising.
A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971).
A chapter titled “What the Hell Happened to Elaine May?” explores the period between 1961 and 1967, when May’s projects and performances were “spotty at best and disappointing at worst, and never all that brilliant.” Courogen refers to it as May’s “flop era,” the kind of slang term that recommends Courogen’s book to a general readership but at times reads as glib. She refers to May as “Elaine” throughout, by which she evidently intends for herself and her readers to forge an emotional connection, though the same sense of familiarity is rarely applied to male subjects. One wonders if something is being sacrificed in the pursuit of a “friendlier” read.
Here, Courogen considers how May’s output was shaped by her process of constant iteration. This approach sometimes resulted in masterworks of black comedy, while at other times, it produced work that was almost too unapologetic—too exacting in its adherence to her vision that it could alienate both her audience and collaborators. Take A Matter of Position, a play May wrote in 1962, about a man (a role intended for Nichols) who goes to bed and decides not to get up. The project was cursed from the start—a dramatically arduous endurance test—but May was seemingly unable to let it lie. When it finally premiered in 2000, under the new title Taller Than a Dwarf, it was excoriated by the critics. May didn’t seem to have updated its content very much at all from almost 40 years prior, when its most antagonizing factor had been its three-hour length; now, reviews lambasted it as dated, even offensive. “She logically feels that ‘the only thing I have to offer is my own voice,’” says actress Caroline Aaron, who turned down a role in the play. “You’re so welcome to not agree with it, to not see it the same way she does. She just can’t cut the suit to fit the fashion. She’s literally incapable of it.”
The chapter derives its name from a 1967 profile in Life magazine, which was the final in-depth interview May gave. She had starred in two films that year, Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing and Clive Donner’s Luv, and was the best part of both. She burrows completely into faux-naïf, self-aware portrayals of women on the fringes of normality. In Enter Laughing, she steals scenes as a world-weary actress who convinces the teenage protagonist to remain in a play through a potent combination of exaggerated sex appeal and downplayed smarts. Opposite Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk in Luv, she brings an intensity rivaling that of her costars, though none are able to salvage the weaknesses of the script.
A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971).
May’s luck turned after a shake-up at Paramount, where new heads of production began prioritizing writers. “Writers were the stars now,” Courogen writes, “and Paramount would do anything to fill their house with those of the highest wattage possible.” The studio wanted to produce a script she had written, based on a story optioned from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. To May’s surprise, they offered her the chance to direct it—initially, she only requested to approve whomever they chose. This would become A New Leaf, in which she would also star—a triple-threat on her first feature. May had not initially wanted to direct but was given the opportunity by the studio so that they didn’t have to pay her original, heftier fee of $200,000; they offered her only $50,000 to direct, but that came with more creative control. Still, getting the executives to agree with her vision was an ongoing battle, and May’s three-and-a-half hour cut was shelved and eventually lost in favor of a lighter version.
“Elaine May would like it very much if you never saw the version of A New Leaf that exists today,” Courogen writes. This poses an interesting dilemma for her admirers. Many consider A New Leaf a masterpiece in its current, abridged, and decidedly less murder-filled form (the original version had Walter Matthau’s Henry Graham killing two others before finally trying for May’s Henrietta). Who’s to say if we’d feel the same about May’s version? Does an appreciation for the film as it is somehow betray a viewer’s affection for May, who went so far as to sue Paramount to get her name off the finished picture?
Courogen’s book doesn’t probe such dilemmas, which can put a person at odds with the artists whose work they so admire, though it provides the backstory and context someone would need to consider these questions themselves. A New Leaf was a success in spite of its production woes (May went over budget and over schedule; at one point the producer tried to replace her), which were trivial compared to what was to come with Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987).
The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972).
May was subsequently hired to direct The Heartbreak Kid (1972), written by playwright Neil Simon. The first issue was May’s having to direct from another writer’s work, considering her predilection for improvising, and the playwright’s adamancy that she not change a word. “They reached an agreement,” Courogen writes. “Elaine had to print one take where the scene was played exactly as written, then she was free to improvise as much as she wanted. The final film would be hers to put together as she saw fit.” The end result embodies May’s sensibility and is all the better for it. What might have been a comedy of errors set against the complexities of interpersonal relationships now unfolds as a dark joke at the expense of its schmucky protagonist.
For Courogen, the film occasions an exploration of May’s Jewish American identity, as some critics argued her portrayal of Jewish characters crossed the line from satire into stereotyping. Charles Grodin’s shallow Lenny is desperate to leave his nebbish new bride for Cybill Shepherd’s shiksa goddess Kelly; the wife, Lila, is played by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin. Feminist groups had problems with the character, called by one critic “one of the most negative images of a Jewish woman on film—created by a Jewish woman, with her own daughter in the role.” Like the friends and acquaintances on whom she often modeled her characters (Lila was based on an old camp friend), May is no more bound to any one element of her identity than another. She’s a Jewish woman, yes, but her full personhood is more nebulous.
Lenny’s journey in the film speaks to another recurring theme of May’s, that of self-hatred, which she mines here both for comedic effect and the opportunity to psychoanalyze her characters. May didn’t just marry a psychoanalyst (her own, in 1964); she was an avid fan of the practice herself, fascinated with the notion of self-exploration to reach a deeper truth. This aligns with May’s broader quest for authenticity in her work, and especially in her characterizations. “I didn’t want to make that girl stupid,” May said. “It would have been so easy to do Lila stupid. I don’t think Lila was stupid. I think every single thing she did was justified to her. I mean, she thought she was being nice. And she was really terrifically in love.” For May, love is in the laughter, difficult though it may sometimes be to parse.
Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976).
The Elaine May-hem comes to the fore when Courogen turns to Mikey and Nicky. The premise for the film can be traced back to her Chicago days, when it was just one of myriad ideas hastily jotted down on scraps of paper. Courogen asserts that it’s not just one of May’s earliest works, “but her most personal one,” inspired by people she knew as a kid who were part of an organized crime syndicate.
The film stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as childhood best friends, one of whom (Cassavetes’s Nicky) is being targeted by their syndicate, while the other (Falk’s Mikey) is helping him out but also, maybe, laying the groundwork for a betrayal. The studio had hoped for a buddy comedy, but slowly realized that’s not what they were going to get. The shoot was chaotic, and like much of her previous work, resisted conventional notions of how such a project should be realized. But the real chaos began during editing, which took more than a year. May famously shot over a million feet of film, going far over schedule and over budget. When the studio demanded she turn the film over to them, she ended up taking the material hostage. Finally, Paramount sent cops to the editing studio, guns drawn, only to find two essential reels were missing.
What happened next involved a tumultuous legal battle during which May stubbornly asserted her final cut privileges and, later, as one recount has it, May’s husband and Falk conspired to hide the reels. Paramount head Barry Diller promised things would go right for May if she brought them back, and she supervised the remainder of the editing. Courogen wonders why May has declined to account for her own role in all of this subterfuge, “never once taking credit for an act that famous fans like Natasha Lyonne and Patton Oswalt have lauded not as self-destructive or disruptive, but as ‘legendary’ and ‘punk-fucking-rock.’” This subsequent mythologizing undergirds the reverence many younger cinephiles now reserve for May, but the Wellesian legends, like those of Welles himself, beg questions of what an appreciation of May might look like without them. Should we romanticize an artist who is herself set against sentimentality?
Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987).
Mikey and Nicky was effectively buried, and, as Courogen declares portentously, “It would be eleven years before she directed again.” In the interim, May began in earnest her career as a venerated script doctor. Otto Preminger’s son, Erik Lee, recalls that his father would often say, “Try and get Elaine to doctor the script,” when something wasn’t working. May had written the screenplay for Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971) under the pseudonym Esther Dale. The issue of credit, and May’s distaste for it when she didn’t feel accurately represented by the end result, is most evident in this phase of her career, suggesting that if she couldn’t control it then she didn’t want to claim it.
In these years, she worked on two scripts for Warren Beatty, Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Reds (1981), and on Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982), starring Dustin Hoffman. May called in favors from Beatty and Hoffman to get them to star in Ishtar, cast against type as bumbling songwriters and romantic saps. The humor is both broad and smartly specific, satirizing then-current events with a remarkable prescience. Beatty also came on as a producer and helped to sell the film to Columbia, hopeful that May’s vision would flourish with a more supportive collaborator at her side. Ironically, this one proved to be the biggest disaster of them all, derailing her feature filmmaking career entirely.
“And then there were the dunes,” Courogen writes. “You know about the dunes. You’ve heard the story.” As the story goes, when May arrived in the Moroccan desert and finally saw the dunes she had insisted on, she demanded her crew level the sand. May’s elusiveness in general lends itself to tall tales, as intricate and laden with hijinks as the films themselves, often wielded to prove just how “difficult” she was. Did this happen? One crew member says yes, another no. And what does May say? Nothing definitive, but a quote from the filmmaker beginning to respond to the claim, enigmatic as always, starts, “The fact that we kind of feel that we can choose the truth, it really…” before trailing off. What it really might lead to, we don’t know.
This time, after filming had wrapped, May and her crew had only exposed 650,000 feet of film. “For Elaine,” Courogen writes, “a film wasn’t something meticulously planned out so much as sculpted from the material she had at hand.” If film was a sculpture for May, it was, also, as Beatty put it in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, “a war. But if the movie comes out and people like it, the wounds of battle heal very quickly.” Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the case with Ishtar. Even before the movie came out, the hit pieces began to roll in. Journalists gleefully harped on the tumultuous production, effectively burying the film before anyone had seen a cut and sounding the death knell for May’s directorial career. It would seem that reports of a woman being “difficult” on set made it difficult for some to appreciate the results.
Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987).
There’s more to May’s story. She would go on to help make an independent film, In the Spirit (1990), written by her daughter; she would continue to work with Nichols, writing his films The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998); she would return to the theater, both as a playwright and an actress; she would win the Tony for Lead Actress in a Play in 2019 for her starring role in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery; she would direct the American Masters film about Nichols after his death in 2014; and she would meet choreographer and filmmaker Stanley Donen, who was her partner until his death in 2019.
I’m glad that Miss May Does Not Exist does exist. It’s a spritely read and thoroughly researched, if at times too casual in an effort to jazz up the facts. One chapter begins, “Well, wait a minute,” which comes off like the proverbial record-scratch, and another takes the form of a screenplay, situating May as a character in the story of her own life. As a biography, it may not complete the entire puzzle, but it gathers most of the pieces; by the end, May seems more real and more brilliant than when those pieces were scattered all over the floor. Since she was so uncompromising in her vision, the context Courogen brings to each project is essential to understanding why the end result might or might not have worked, whether it’s a question of her vision being imperiled by outside interference, or of the dramatic flaws she couldn’t fix even with full artistic sovereignty. Maybe all this is to say that it goes beyond May herself—maybe, after reading the book, Miss May does not exist as we previously imagined her to, but rather as something much more complicated and indefinable.