DID MIKE NICHOLS SQUANDER HIS LUCK ON ‘HEARTBURN’?

Mike Nichols was improvising. The former improvisational comedian who (with Elaine May) brought psychoanalytic humor to America in the 1950s was at it again. Nichols was trying to explain “Heartburn,” the Meryl Streep-Jack Nicholson domestic comedy that has since opened to completely mixed notices. He was on the spot, in his own living room. And Nichols was taking his time with the answer. He might have been improvising the role of the English dentist he used to do onstage. (Leaning over the patient, who was Elaine May, the dentist said, “I knew before I met you I loved you. There I’ve said it! Rinse out, please.”) Nichols has this forbidding way of looking at you, not unlike a demon dentist--or a shrink. He seems to be asking, “Did you get it? If so, how much did you get?” But before saying a word he takes a very long time.

Explanations are tricky, because “Heartburn” is nothing if not a roman a clef, written in the first person, and its players are alive and very visible. Nora Ephron, who based the book tightly on the breakup of her marriage to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, also wrote the screenplay for “Heartburn”--but Ephron isn’t meeting the press. Bernstein has his say in the September Playboy now on the stands, but otherwise he is keeping unusually mum. (At least publicly.) The actors are hired hands. Nicholson only signed on for “Heartburn” one week into shooting, after the exit of Mandy Patinkin, who was to play the fictionalized Bernstein. Streep only came to the project shortly after finishing “Out of Africa.” So it’s largely up to Nichols to explain “Heartburn.”

Why explain? In anticipation of what the critics might say. If “Heartburn” were to get unqualified raves, Nichols would only have to improvise a bow. But the reviews have since run a gamut from hate to love that even an analyst might have trouble with. Time’s Richard Corliss: “True and painful and funny.” People’s Peter Travers: “Streep and Nicholson have never opened up more emotionally onscreen.” And then there was the rave-of-the-week from the Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio: “A masterpiece . . . and something of a summing-up for Nichols, who more successfully than any other American director, has staked out the terrain where men and women meet as his own.”

Then there was the other camp. Newsweek’s Jack Kroll: “ ‘Heartburn’ doesn’t seem to be about anything.” The Times’ Sheila Benson: “Thin stuff from rich talents.” USA Today’s Mike Clark: “Too scattershot to make sense.” The movie opened strongly--$5.7 million in three days at 843 theaters--but it is too soon to determine its staying power.

Director Nichols, a critics’ darling since his debut play “Barefoot in the Park” and his debut picture “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” isn’t used to defending himself. So improvising was in order. Questions were invented to help him along: Is “Heartburn” about the failure of a two-star marriage? Is it about yuppie love? Is it about jealousy? Two years ago, Nichols explained that “Heartburn” was about “a woman doomed to be in the right, and therefore alone.”

Now he had a variation on the theme: “ ‘Heartburn’ may be about squandering your luck,” he said as if the answer had finally come. “It may be that we don’t get lucky that way--with love--very often, and to squander it is to take a big chance for the man. And for the woman, too. She does a certain kind of squandering, of a different kind maybe, but . . . ‘Heartburn’ is also about what Carly Simon (who did the film’s score) calls ‘coming around again.’ With any luck in life we do come around again.”

If devotees of Ephron’s novel are having problems with Nichols’ movie, Nichols has his own explantion: “I don’t know a great deal about Nora’s story,” he professed, sitting very still and erect in the tree-lined, book-lined living room that faces Central Park. (Ephron co-wrote “Silkwood” for Nichols after the breakup with Bernstein.) “ ‘Heartburn’ is fiction, after all,” defended Nichols, “and with a work of fiction we don’t know everything. We don’t really know the basis of most fictions. If you talk to spouses of major novelists through time, what would you learn about their private lives? Are novels disguised reality or not? And if so, how much disguised?”

When it’s mentioned that the Carl Bernsteins were not as notorious as, say, the Richard Burtons or the Sean Penns, Nichols nodded. “I know what you mean. The movie is meant to show little bits of people we know, and to tell a larger story than Nora’s own. All we know for sure is that certain people know about some of the events. It’s like real life, yet it’s no truer to real life than (Proust’s) ‘Swann’s Way.’ The point-of-view of the picture is not what really happened, but what will really happen. Ideally, this story will connect to your own life.”

And if not, not. Nichols has what appears to be (and has been acknowledged to be) a laissez-faire attitude in the midst of chaos. Example: When Patinkin left “Heartburn,” there were no leaks to the press as to why, no public explanations. (The movie could be called a top-to-bottom Sam Cohn project. Cohn, the Manhattan-based ICM agent, represents Nichols, Streep and Patinkin.) Ask Nichols now about Patinkin’s disappearance, and he will say, “Let’s talk about Jack. Let’s talk about how Nicholson is a master of bringing life to every scene.” But what about Patinkin? “The chemistry was better between Meryl and Jack. Period.”

To really change the subject, Nichols went so far as to credit Nicholson with creating “my first painless experience shooting a movie, on ‘Carnal Knowledge.’ I always loved the pre-production work on movies, and I loved the editing process. But I abhorred the actual shooting. I was terrified. I would always sigh with relief,” sighed Nichols, “when something was finally shot. Most people would give anything in the world to make a living the way I do, and they are right. But not until Nicholson, on ‘Carnal,’ and Meryl, on ‘Silkwood’--and then the two of them on this--did I love the actual shooting.”

Nichols not enjoying movie making? Even after his celebrated debut (“Virginia Woolf”), after winning an Oscar for “The Graduate,” and after becoming the first star director to command a six-figure salary (for “Catch-22”)? In the late ‘60s, Nichols found himself barely 35 and stuck with the nickname “Midas.” (“A journalistic figment,” he calls the label now.) But for a solid decade he had almost owned Broadway (“Luv,” “Plaza Suite,” “Apple Tree”), if not Hollywood (“The Graduate,” “Carnal Knowledge”). Then 10 years ago, after the failure of his Warren Beatty-Jack Nicholson film, “The Fortune,” Midas Nichols vanished. In 1976 there was a shutdown during the first week of production on his Robert De Niro-Marsha Mason-Neil Simon comedy called “Bogart Slept Here,” and Mike Nichols didn’t make another full-scale movie until “Silkwood” eight years later. (“Gilda Live” was docu-comedy and doesn’t count.)

In person Nichols is like an intellectual Puck, curious and yet almost completely protected by serious people at this point in his life. Nichols, who briefly studied pre-med and wanted to be a psychiatrist, could easily have become one of those specialists one goes to in extreme moments. His intelligence is not an improvisation--it’s not something he pastes on each morning like eyebrows. His choices, especially in the ‘60s and ‘80s, are object lessons in how to launch and maintain a show-business career. Like almost nobody else, he’s used actors (Ann-Margret, “Carnal Knowledge”) and playwrights (Tom Stoppard, who rewrote “The Real Thing” for Broadway, and for Nichols) and opportunities (he jumped in with enough last-minute funding for “Annie” that he could rename the Broadway musical “Annuity”). In other words, Nichols can probably outsmart almost anyone on either coast, which would almost bestow on him a noblesse oblige attitude.

But for years the question has been, Did Mike Nichols abandon Hollywood or was it the other way around? In 1983, Nichols made “Silkwood” and got Oscar-nominated. The popular thinking was that Hollywood had either forgiven Nichols his commercial failures--”The Day of the Dolphin” and “The Fortune”--or forgotten them. But the Directors Guild of America didn’t nominate him for “Silkwood.” So maybe all was not forgotten. At any rate, he remained in New York (and in Connecticut, at his 60-acre farm). Traditionally, Wunderkind directors--names like Elia Kazan and Joseph Mankiewicz--would return from Hollywood to the East with bodies of work behind them. But Nichols even now is only 55.

“In California,” said Nichols slowly, “I always feel I’m missing out on something. I pick up those trade papers, and I feel other people are doing things I don’t know about.” The look in Nichols’ eyes was conspiratorial, a glint. As though he wasn’t sure anyone knows he has a 375-acre horse ranch near Santa Barbara--even if he is ambivalent about California. (He is also private--if not reclusive--about the details of his multiple marriages or his children.)

“California is a swell place to live if you imagine yourself an anthropologist,” he decided. “It reminds me of . . . well, it’s like when Elaine (May) and I were performing. And I would worry about things like ‘Is this the best dressing room?’ or ‘Did you check our billing on the marquee?’ That’s the baby part of me, and in California I take a little slide toward the baby part. I find California easier for living, but it’s also easier there to avoid real life.”

Yet again Nichols had almost maneuvered his way out of a question, or had he? “Had I had it with the movie business after ‘The Fortune’?” Nichols asked himself out loud. “No . . . and it wasn’t movie people I didn’t like. One of the lessons of ‘The Fortune,’ in my view, and God knows who else’s view, is that it’s not enough just to put together good people. You have to have an idea. You can’t just wait for the idea. I don’t believe in picking fruit before it’s ripe. But you have to either find an idea or forge one eventually.”

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” would seem to have been the ideal idea, for starters. Yet to tackle Edward Albee’s catharsis play as a debut film was one of those gambles that only in retrospect looks inevitable. Tyro Nichols came to Warner Bros. facing not only Elizabeth Taylor, who was set to play the 50ish Martha, but also the late Jack Warner, the waning tycoon of the lot. ‘Virginia Woolf’ was one of Warner’s own swan songs, the most expensive black-and-white movie shot to that time, and Mike Nichols was not yet 35.

“Do you think ‘Virginia Woolf’ was a gamble?” he asked coyly. “That’s funny. A very bright woman friend of mine said it was not enough of a challenge. She said it was a sure thing. . . . Actually, for me it was a learning film. You can see me learning as we go along.”

Example: Nichols demanded the title sequence be shot in Northampton, Mass., “because I had this crazy notion that a sound stage wouldn’t look authentic. And they indulged me, because I felt so strongly.” Here Nichols’ boyish-modest front appeared: “They indulged me” is not unlike his “Graduate” acceptance speech at the N.Y. Critics Awards when, after thanking his associates, he added, “I can’t really tell you who did what. I hope I did some of it.”

Under the boyish-modest attitude, however, are more revealing admissions. “God, the things I didn’t know about movies!” Nichols confessed. “I had to check a print of ‘Virginia Woolf’ recently for one of those Lincoln Center tributes, and I took one of my kids along. We saw the first three reels, and I thought, ‘This is not what my kid wants to watch. . . .’ Then I realized it got better as it went along, because I was learning. On that movie I was like a kid taking things for granted, making things up, diving in. Kids do things relatively unquestioningly. I was diving in.”

But to direct Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton the first time out? “Elizabeth was set before I came along, but Richard wasn’t; he needed to be suggested, which seems impossible now, but it’s true. Richard and I once shared an alley on Broadway. ‘Camelot’ was at the Majestic Theater, and ‘An Evening With Nichols and May’ was at the Golden Theater. He was a pal, and Elizabeth I was getting to know pretty well, and. . . .” (Almost unknown is the fact that Taylor insisted on Nichols. During her Roman fracas on “Cleopatra,” and the publicity surrounding the Burton-Taylor affair, Nichols was one of the only friends to fly to Italy to be with the couple. The stars didn’t forget.)

And Nichols was launched in Hollywood.

The follow-up film, the one that got him the Oscar and a generation of devotees, was “The Graduate.” It made Nichols a culture hero because Nichols made Southern California look like another planet, sexy and rich and full of new chances. Especially for Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) and Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), if not the clones they inspired. Two years ago Bancroft told Calendar, “I never worked harder in my life! Mike’s theory about Mrs. Robinson was very clear: All grown-ups were bad and all kids were wonderful.”

Now Nichols disputed this notion. “I don’t remember telling Anne Bancroft that,” he said thoughtfully. “What ‘The Graduate’ is about for me is something very different. The movie always was, and still is, about finding yourself surrounded by objects and people who are concerned with objects. It’s about saving yourself from becoming an object, through passion and, if necessary, madness.”

Nichols admitted that, yes, Doris Day had been sought to play Mrs. Robinson. (“I believe we did ask her, and she turned it down because of the love scenes, but my memory is not so strong now and wasn’t even then.”) The very married, very available Mrs. Robinson struck nerves, and sent lots of American youths to California, in search of seduction. “Mrs. Robinson,” said Nichols, “is a person who did not like what she let her life become. She’s angry at herself, and therefore angry at others. And then there’s Benjamin, who felt he was drowning in things. He determines to become prouder of himself and his whole situation by going as far as he can. He hits bottom, then bounces back. That’s what usually happens, in life and movies, and it’s dramatic to see it.”

But what happens next? A sequel to “The Graduate” seems if not inevitable, then intriguing, and Nichols doesn’t disagree. Some time went into speculating over who and how and in what way a sequel could be done. Would Ben and Elaine (Mrs. Robinson’s daughter) return to Beverly Hills? Would they split like the couple in “Heartburn”? “Partly you don’t want to tamper with it,” reasoned Nichols. “Also it’s hard to know where they all are. But let’s think about it: Do they all forgive each other? And in what manner? They can’t go on, you know, until they forgive each other, which is true in life as well. But do they have Mrs. Robinson over for dinner? I mean, here you have this seductive mother-in-law. . . . I don’t know. Maybe it ends like ‘Down and Out in Beverly Hills.’ ”

The irony of Nichols and Beverly Hills is how little time he’d spent there before so accurately catching it on film. “But it was there to be caught! Those were the days: (Production designer) Dick Sylbert and I spent six months looking and preparing. We were obsessive. We’d ask each other questions like ‘What would you see from a helicopter?’ Answer: You’d see a pool behind every house. That means the line of the bathing suit strap has to be just right because these are people who spend a lot of time by their pools.”

No tan-lines for Nichols, however. Before, during and after his Hollywood stay, he worked consistently on New York stages, and won six Tonys for directing. His output might seem compulsive to anyone not versed in show business compulsion. A-show-a-season (or sometimes two shows) seems almost to have been his motto. “I suppose it looks like I’ve been working all the time,” he admitted. “But I have to tell you, I am also happy and capable of just hanging out.” Yet while editing “Silkwood,” he directed “Hurlyburly” on Broadway. While editing “Heartburn,” he directed “Social Security” on Broadway. “I like the process,” he said simply. “ I like taking the stuff that happens to us and pulling it in to something worth watching.”

A case can be made that Nichols’ career as stage director was charmed from day one. In 1962, after his breakup with Elaine May, he was “the leftover half of a comedy team.” But only months later he got a $500 offer to direct a summer-stock production of a play called “Nobody Loves Me,” starring Robert Redford. Nichols still claims he “backed into it. There was no plan or purpose. But then there never was a plan ever. When Elaine and I were working together, people used to ask us, ‘What kind of work do you kids do during the day?’ We never knew what to say. Working in improvisation, as I was with Elaine, meant I was working with a director’s point-of-view. Improvisation gives you that; it gives you the elements of a scene, the need for conflict, and the tools that keep an audience interested.”

Becoming a director “may have been a conscious act, and it may have been luck,” Nichols claimed. “What if (producer) Saint Subber hadn’t asked me to direct ‘Nobody Loves Me?’ The play became ‘Barefoot in the Park’ (and won Nichols his first Tony). But if Saint Subber hadn’t asked, I might never have directed. But also I might have. Yet from that very first day of rehearsal I knew I liked directing. It fit. I liked being asked how do you do this?

Nichols was asked to recall his first day directing, and his laugh was mysterious. “I remember Redford. There were altogether six days of rehearsal because this was summer stock. So my direction consisted of saying, ‘You stand here, Bob,’ and ‘You go over there, honey,’ and ‘Your arm is exposed.’ I was meticulous in a superficial way. Did I see a larger career for myself? No. Then one day Redford did something.”

To demonstrate, Nichols stood up and mock-flipped his collar to improvise a man wearing a topcoat and simultaneously lifting a body. “I remember telling Redford, ‘The first thing to know is that being on stage is like being in a battle, and the first thing you do is admit to being in battle.’ Anyway, Redford and the other characters in the play have just come back from a Greek restaurant, and they’ve walked up five flights of stairs. And Bob said something smart. He said, ‘What if I carried the mother-in-law up the stairs?’ He was right, and it got an enormous laugh. Then I said to Bob, ‘I think your character might have a head cold.’ You don’t have weighty discussions with a six-day rehearsal period. But Redford was, and is, such a good actor that he suddenly had a cold. I don’t mean he went home for two days and worked out a head cold. I mean he got a cold then and there. I think at that moment I decided I loved what I was doing.”

The joy (or power) came relatively late. Late, that is, if if one subscribes to a Nichols Theory of Life. The theory: “There are people to whom all good things happen in the first part of their lives--and then there are the rest of us.” Nichols, who admits he was not particularly happy in his first half, was a German immigrant who arrived in America by ship at the age of 7, accompanied only by his younger brother. (He spoke only two sentences: “I do not speak English” and “Do not kiss me.”) The brothers’ doctor father died only a few years later, leaving very little cash. It would seem a grim saga, but Nichols, as usual, is surprising. And, again, improvising. He was suddenly remembering the Bremen, the German boat that brought the refugee brothers to America. By screwing up his face Nichols became 7 years old. A very forbidding 7 years old.

“That little boy on the boat wasn’t so unhappy,” he said, attempting a Jack Nicholson grin. “I remember now looking for the prow of the boat, or was it the bow? I remember asking a fellow passenger, in German, where was the tip? I meant in which direction. He pointed to the tip of my nose. And I said, ‘No, no, no, I mean the front of the boat! Don’t kid around!’ Well, he wasn’t kidding around. . . . And I was looking ahead, even then. And you know what?” Nichols was about to revise his theory. “I now think there are people who are happy as children, happy in high school, and happy straight through life. Isn’t that depressing?”