Funny girl

At The Oldie’s 75th-birthday party for the Queen Consort last year, Craig Brown asked me if there was still a star I craved to meet.

Without hesitation, I replied, ‘Elaine May.’ She turned 90 on 21st April and she lives in New York. It might be possible.

In 1983, I watched her film The Heartbreak Kid (the 1972 version). I watched it in bed, more or less chewing the sheets, as a newly-wed falls in love with a girl other than his wife on his honeymoon. It occurred to me that, with such an enormous commitment made, this must sometimes happen.

Elaine May is enormously famous, but we should all know her much better. She was born in Philadelphia in 1932, the daughter of a Jewish director and actor and his actress wife, and first went on stage aged three. She married at 16, divorcing ten years later. Two further marriages and a long-term relationship with Stanley Donen followed.

In 1955, at the age of 23, with but seven dollars to her name, she joined the Compass Players in Chicago where, fortuitously, she teamed up with the late Mike Nichols (1931-2014).

They went on to form their own stage act as Nichols and May in 1957, creating a new brand of ironic comedy which filled theatres across America, ran for nine months on Broadway and then extended into television. They described the technique as like jazz but improvising with words rather than music.

‘We base our comedy on the recognisable things that happen to people,’ declared Nichols.

In 1958, they shot from earning $50 a week to $5,000 for a single TV slot. They were taken up by the agent Jack Rollins (who lived to be 100), asking him for an opening and a closing line and then improvising.

Rollins recalled, ‘Suddenly comedy was being formed right in front of my eyes, and I mean comedy that was side-splitting and irresistible. I was howling.’

They were hired for two weeks in a club called the Blue Angel, soon extended to ten weeks.

A press report in 1959 pointed out, ‘I have never met two people whose minds were so perfectly attuned. If one went off on a dizzy tangent while answering a question, the other would immediately continue riding the rocket until they were off to another planet.’

Among their sketches, there is the grief lady at Long Dust selling a bereaved man a cheap funeral, then adding extras – a casket: ‘It looks better.’

Then there’s the first tense teenage date in a car, or the obtuse telephone operator failing to help the caller find George Kaplan – ‘K as in knife, A as in aardvark, P as pneumonia…’ There’s a series of doctor, patient and nurse sketches, a man seducing a girl from the office while his wife is in the mountains, and a mother calling her son when he has been sending up a rocket.

Particularly entertaining is a vapid film star giggling her way through the promotion of her latest musical movie, Two Gals in Paris, revealed to be the life story of Gertrude Stein. They are all as much a joy to listen to today as they were 60 years ago. Noël Coward judged them ‘outstanding’, and Neil Simon wrote of ‘their high-style wit and their sophisticated but hilarious routines. They were in a class by themselves.’ Simon added, ‘Unlike most comedians, however, they were brilliant actors.’

In May 1962, they performed at the Madison Square Garden birthday celebration for President Kennedy (at which Marilyn Monroe sang ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’).

And then they went their separate ways, fearful of becoming typecast and anxious to move forward.

She became a director, screenwriter, playwright and actor, appearing in her own comedy, A New Leaf (1971), opposite Walter Matthau, and directed The Heartbreak Kid. She can be spotted, unscripted, giving Benjamin a letter from Elaine Robinson in The Graduate (1967), directed by Nichols, and the core story is perhaps similar.

In The Graduate, the ‘hero’ starts off with one woman and swaps her for another one.

In The Heartbreak Kid, Charles Grodin marries, is horrified by his bride (Jeannie Berlin, Elaine’s daughter) eating Milky Ways in bed, and with egg down her face at breakfast, on the way to their ill-fated honeymoon in Miami Beach, and is then diverted by a gorgeous blonde, Cybill Shepherd.

Simon wrote the screenplay. So there is plenty of slick Jewish humour, and there are memorable phrases, such as ‘There’s no deceit in the cauliflower.’

May knew how to develop the characters but had no idea how to dress them. Costume designer Anthea Sylbert told her Cybill Shepherd had to have white cotton underwear. ‘That’s what those blondes wear,’ she said.

Vincent Canby reviewed the film for the New York Times: ‘It’s a movie that manages the marvellous and very peculiar trick of blending the mechanisms and the cruelties of Simon’s comedy with the sense and sensibility of F Scott Fitzgerald.’

It would take pages to analyse all May’s achievements, not least her teaming up with Mike Nichols for The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998).

At an AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010, she gave a hilarious speech in Nichols’s honour.

Of The Graduate, she said, ‘And then when they’re on the bus and he’s won, he has nothing to say to her and you think, “Oh well, yeah, of course.”

‘And if you kept the camera on the prince after he put the glass slipper on Cinderella’s foot, what would he say to her? He would say, “Nice shoes.”

‘If you’re a writer, you really want Mike to direct your screenplay because you know that every shot and every costume and every piece of furniture and every shoe and everything you see is going to tell your story and never give it away.’

On 25th March last year, she won an honorary Oscar.

She proved she had lost none of her verve: ‘They told me Zelensky would introduce me tonight!’

Hugo Vickers is author of Malice in Wonderland: My Adventures in the World of Cecil Beaton