On April 28, 1939, a ship from Germany docked in New York carrying two little boys traveling without their parents. The older one was seven, born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on November 6, 1931, and this week he would have turned 95. He spoke almost no English. He had been taught exactly two sentences for the trip, and he loved to tell people what they were: “I do not speak English,” and “Please do not kiss me,” as the American Film Institute and NPR both recounted.
That boy grew up to be Mike Nichols, the director of The Graduate and one of the very few people ever to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. He spent his whole life saying that the frightened child on that boat was the secret to everything that came after, and the person who finally made him feel at home did not arrive until he was in his fifties.
How Did A Refugee Boy Become Mike Nichols?
Mike and his three-year-old brother, Robert, were sent ahead on one of the last refugee boats out of Nazi Germany. Their father, a Russian-born doctor named Pavel Peschkowsky, had gone to New York the year before and renamed himself Paul Nichols, and their mother, Brigitte, escaped through Italy in 1940, according to PBS and Wikipedia. The family tree held surprises, too. Brigitte’s parents were the anarchist writer Gustav Landauer and the poet Hedwig Lachmann, and the PBS series Faces of America confirmed a family legend that Albert Einstein was a distant cousin.
The new life was hard. His father died of leukemia in 1944, when Mike was about 12. Years earlier, around age four, a reaction to a whooping cough vaccine had left him unable to grow hair, and he wore wigs and false eyebrows for the rest of his life. “He had a childhood reaction to a vaccine that resulted in the loss of all of his hair,” biographer Mark Harris told CBS News. A bald immigrant boy with an accent learned to watch people very closely, and that habit was about to make him famous.
What Happened To Nichols And May?
At the University of Chicago, Nichols found the first person who seemed to think exactly the way he did. Elaine May was sharp, strange and fearless, and together they invented a kind of improvised sketch comedy that America had never heard before. Their two-person show, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, opened on Broadway on October 8, 1960, and ran for 306 performances, according to the Internet Broadway Database. Their comedy album won a Grammy.
Then, at the height of their success in 1961, they stopped. The partnership ended almost as quickly as it had begun, and Nichols, suddenly on his own, did something nobody expected. He started telling other actors what to do.
How Did Mike Nichols Win Every Major Award?
He turned out to be a natural. Nichols won his first Tony for directing Barefoot in the Park in 1964, and by the end of his career he had nine of them. His first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and his second, The Graduate, won him the Oscar for Best Director in 1968. Our story on what Nichols knew about the ending of The Graduate shows how carefully he built that final bus ride.
The Emmys came late, for Wit in 2001 and Angels in America in 2004, and they made him one of the rare EGOT winners. He always said the outsider’s eye was his real gift. “The thing about being an outsider, no matter what, is that there’s a good part, which is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking,” he told NPR in 2012. But the greatest stroke of luck in his life had nothing to do with show business. It happened in an airport lounge.
The Woman He Met While Waiting For The Concorde
In 1986, Nichols was sitting in an airport lounge in Paris, waiting for the Concorde back to New York, when he struck up a conversation with Diane Sawyer of 60 Minutes, according to Biography.com and the Reuters obituary. He had been married three times. They married on April 29, 1988, and she called him “generous and adventurous and a little wild and utterly kind,” in an interview with People that Biography.com later recounted. You can read about Sawyer’s recent return to Good Morning America here.
They stayed together for the rest of his life, 26 years. Mike Nichols died suddenly of a heart attack at home in Manhattan on November 19, 2014, at 83, leaving Sawyer, his three children, Daisy, Max and Jenny, and four grandchildren. ABC News president James Goldston announced that he had “passed away suddenly on Wednesday evening.” The little boy who stepped off that ship in 1939 with two memorized sentences had spent 75 years proving he could understand Americans better than they understood themselves. “Because I learned to hear what people are thinking,” he told NPR, “I think it stood me in good stead.”
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