195. Elaine May — Miss May Does Not Exist with Carrie Courogen

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books (and in this case films) by forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY HELMES: And I’m Amy Helmes. Today we’re going to be discussing a comedian, screenwriter, director and actor who got her start in the legendary Eisenhower-era comedy team known as Nichols and May. 

KIM: As in Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Some of you may be thinking… “Elaine May isn’t exactly lost,” and you’d be right. Sort of. Because if you do know her name, it’s in spite of Elaine May herself. She adamantly refused to be credited on many of the huge, critically-acclaimed, award-winning films she helped write, including Tootsie and The Birdcage. 

AMY: She’s a fascinating woman whom many have dubbed a genius. Yet I should probably confess: Before prepping for this episode, I knew her name only relative to Mike Nichols. And I certainly didn’t realize what a big deal she was (and is! She’s still alive).

KIM: Same, Amy. I’d heard her name and seen and loved some of her films, oftentimes without even knowing she had anything to do with them! 

AMY: I guess we shouldn’t feel too badly, Kim. Maybe she wanted it that way.

KIM: True. I mean, in the liner notes for her first comedy LP with Nichols, her bio reads, “Miss May does not exist.” 

KIM: Which also happens to be the title of our guest Carrie Courogen’s fantastic new bio on Elaine May, out today from St. Martin’s Press. 

AMY: I’m so excited. Let’s raid the film archives and get started! 

[Intro music plays] 

AMY: Carrie Courogen’s writing has appeared in publications like Bright Wall/Dark Room (where she is an associate editor), Glamour Magazine, NPR, PAPER, Vanity Fair, Vice, and many more, in addition to her Substack, bed crumbs. She is currently the associate director of creative development, digital video, for Pitchfork and the culture collection (that’s Vanity Fair, Teen Vogue, and Tatler) at Condé Nast. 

KIM: Miss May Does Not Exist is already garnering rave reviews. Critic Claire Dederer wrote of it: “Carrie Courogen has written the biography Elaine May deserves. Shimmering with insight and grounded in deep research, this book is as iconoclastic, engaging, and challenging as Miss May herself.” Happy pub day, Carrie, and welcome to the show! 

CARRIE COUROGEN: Thank you so much for having me. 

AMY: All right, so let's jump right into Elaine's story. She was born in 1932 in Philadelphia. Her parents were Yiddish vaudevillians, so she had a really interesting childhood, to say the least. Carrie, is there any defining moment or influences that sort of led to her becoming this comic genius?

CARRIE: I think there were two really formative experiences for Elaine. First, I think she grew up in a vaudeville environment where everything was heightened, and all of the realities of the day in the 1930s, all of the horrors of the world were twisted into melodrama or comedy or heightened into some fantasized version of reality. I think that really shaped her notion that everything can become a story. And then the second thing that I think really shaped who she is was the sudden death of her father when she was 10 years old. He traveled a lot as a vaudeville actor, and sometimes Elaine and her mother went with him, sometimes they didn't. And sometimes when they didn't, he would be gone for months at a time. And so she has this father figure who is so built up in her mind, and she's so kind of worshipful of, because she doesn't really know him all that well. And when she's 10 years old, he dies very suddenly, and it really shakes her world. Her family is incredibly poor at the time and really left with nothing and scrambling to figure out how are they going to survive his absence. And I think that gave her this sudden idea of the world as a really cruel and hostile place, a place that cannot be trusted. Full of people you can't depend on to take care of you. Full of people who will leave you at any moment. And especially if you're a woman, stuff's gonna happen to you and you don't have any control over it. And that's reflected in a lot of her work that would come, especially a lot of her early work. And I think she dealt with that view by turning it into stories, by escaping into these worlds that she could create to leave all of the pain of her real life. And I think later that became comedy, but at first it wasn't. At first I think it was a lot of drama that was just really reflecting her ideas of society that had been shaped by that one single instance.

KIM: So she had this really difficult childhood that you've just shared with us. They didn't have any money, they're moving all the time, her father dies. How is this impacting her education?

CARRIE: So, it's funny that Elaine May is such a genius because she really only has formally an 8th grade education. She was always bouncing around schools, never really staying long enough to go through all of the lessons or to even do a year at a school. And this whole time, she's deeply curious about things, and she's a voracious reader, and she loves to write. And she just keeps thinking, as she gets older, "This is pointless, and I don't know why I'm learning the same rote memorization bullshit. It's not gonna serve me in my life. I'd rather learn what I want to learn." And so by the time she's 14 and living in L. A, she's like, “I'm just gonna drop out. I'm not gonna go to school.” And so she drops out, and she does really teach herself. She spends so much time reading literature, and like at 14, 15 years old, reading Dostoevsky and reading Chekhov and writing all of these short stories and plays in her own sort of way. And I think she learned from it what she was interested in and learned to become an expert in it without actually learning it from a set sort of standard method.

KIM: Right. So then, um, she does drop out. She gets married at the age of 16. She has her only child, Jeannie Berlin, at age 18. 

AMY: Can I interrupt there? Because that sounds shocking to me. She got married at the age of 16. Was that normal for the time?

CARRIE: Not really. I mean, it wasn't as taboo as it is now, but it was still like, you know, you'd wait till you were 18 maybe or 19. It's hard to tell exactly why she got married. I would suspect that it was to get out of her mother's house. They had a difficult relationship, and I think she probably was like, "All right, see ya." Um, but yeah, I mean, she's 16 and he was, I think, 18. So it's not set up for success. By the time they're newly parents, it takes maybe six months for them to separate and for her to go back to her mom's house.

AMY: All right, so she's now a very young single mother. So what happens next?

CARRIE: So she's floundering, trying to figure out, you know, what is her purpose in life? How is she going to make money? How is she going to express her creative side? She goes to acting classes in LA and things start to click for her, but then she's a little bit like, "I think I'll go to college and I'll become extremely educated." But you know, she doesn't have a high school degree, and at the time, certain schools would take you if you didn't have one; not many, but some. And she had friends who were going to Chicago, just kind of like going to hitchhike there and do theater there, and she found out that the University of Chicago would take her without a high school degree. So she joins them. She has like $7 and hits the road and leaves Jeannie with her mother and really goes off to discover herself.

AMY: So this is where her life is going to intersect with a very pivotal person. And as I said in the introduction, I always associate Elaine May with Mike Nichols. Their collaboration is legendary. But how did this partnership come about, Carrie?

CARRIE: Their partnership really came about at the University of Chicago where Mike was studying and Elaine was not really enrolled; she kind of just dropped in on classes and fell in with a theater scene there that Mike had fallen in with. Their first meeting was really like, "I hate you and you hate me." But not long after they were in a subway station, an El station together, and started improvising. They started pretending they were spies and carried this whole routine home. And after that, it was really inseparable. And they started working together, and Mike knew that he could perform best with Elaine. And Elaine could perform with anybody. And they start doing these improvisations that are funny. At the time, improv was solely a theater exercise, but it wasn't the performance itself. And the son of the woman, Viola Spolin, who invented this sort of theater exercise, was part of this troupe that Elaine and Mike were part of and thought, "Well, wait a second. Why don't we try that as the entertainment?" And Elaine just was like a natural at it.

KIM: I just love that part of the story, because it's like she's finally getting to be herself, and it's amazing.

AMY: We think of, like, oh, The Groundlings. We know what that is. But imagine being an audience member and seeing that for the first time and getting to see these people that are thinking so quickly on their feet and making you laugh, and inventing that form, basically. It's amazing.

KIM: It's so cool. 

AMY: It's almost like they're a precursor to “Saturday Night Live,” right? 

CARRIE: Totally. The theater that they were part of became Second City, which is a feeding ground for SNL. They were the ones who started it. And Elaine was one of the ones who created the rules of improv, you know, "Yes, and…" and, you know, "Make a choice, don't deny." All of those things she came up with. She came up with the standard that went and informed everything up through SNL.

AMY: I want to play a quick clip from one of Elaine May and Mike Nichols' sketches. 

[plays sketch]

Okay, so I'll stop it there. It goes on and on 

KIM: I mean, I was laughing aloud while you were playing that. I had to mute myself because it's hilarious. Listeners, you have to go watch it. Um, We'll link to it in our show notes. But basically, she's gorgeous, um, these gestures play into it too. There's a physical comedy. They have incredible chemistry. Carrie, do you want to talk a little bit about the hallmarks of a Nichols and May sketch? What do you think were the key elements of her style in particular that made them basically a sensation?

CARRIE: Obviously, like you pointed out, their chemistry. There was so much like, "Are they a couple? Are they not a couple? Did they? Didn't they?" And they did, um, very briefly when they were back in Chicago and then very quickly were like, "No, no, no, we can't do this. We're just very good friends." But I think obviously that informed their strong connection and sort of, I wouldn't say their "shtick," because they could be all over the place. The thing that I love about Nichols and May is they were unpredictable. They didn't fall into the hallmark funny man, straight man bit. They would trade off. Sometimes Elaine's the straight man, sometimes Elaine's the one who's pulling the gag. They tap into these neuroses of young people at the time — young educated people at the time. They're really making fun of that. And they're making fun of themselves. So many of their sketches were about sex or about romance and how funny that could be. And this is in the Fifties. This is in the super chaste era of entertainment. And people were not used to that. People were shocked by it, but also, the people who started to see them when they were in New York then in the downtown scene are young people, and they want to see something that isn't boring and family friendly, the USO sort of “Bob Hope” of it all. They want to see something that's thrilling and exciting, and they want to see things that are about themselves. And Nichols and May, I think, they could really capture this anxiety and concern of urban young professionals, in a way. People would say they have "snob and mob" appeal.

AMY: All right, so they're doing something kind of radical here, challenging societal norms. Are there any other risks that Elaine was taking at the time that would have been different or unusual? 

CARRIE: Well, I mean, being a woman in comedy at the time was super unusual, especially in sketch comedy, which was still a very young form. It's before Joan Rivers. It's before or right around actually the same time as Phyllis Diller. And it's really like the three of them who are in this club circuit doing variations on stand-up or sketch comedy. I don't want to say that Elaine was doing stand-up, but it was similar in form in the sense that it was really just her and Mike on a set of stools without any props, without anything to aid their storytelling. It's just they were making things up. I was so expecting to see some, like, sexism in the press coverage of her. Like, "Well, she's hot and he's funny." And it was really like, no, she's the funny one outta the two of them. And it was like, "She's so good. She's so talented. And also she's gorgeous." The thing too, is she was gorgeous, but she didn't try to be. She was so unkempt and did not care about her appearance. People would have to make sure she looked suitable for some of the swanky clubs that they performed in because she just didn't care. She was like an absent-minded professor. She was so laser-focused on the work she was doing. She could have two different pairs of socks on or hadn't brushed her hair and didn't even realize it. 

KIM: So all this is happening, but I really want our listeners to understand how hugely famous Nichols and May were during this time. So can you give our listeners a quick sketch of what her life was like at this time? It was pretty amazing. 

CARRIE: She really did have instant fame and it was not for 15 minutes. And that, I think, was really jarring to her. She and Mike come to New York to try and pitch themselves as an act. They're broke. They have nothing. And within like two weeks, they're performing in a club downtown, and within a few days of doing that, they start to get a huge audience that's coming for them and not for Mort Sahl, who they were opening for. A few weeks later, they're Uptown and there are lines out the door. There are people waiting till like midnight to see them. They're New York's hottest ticket. And then they appear on television, and suddenly, you know, it's nationwide fame. Television appearance after television appearance after television appearance. Everyone knows who they are all of a sudden, and they're getting so much press coverage and they're 24 and 25 years old. I think it was really incredibly jarring for them. They take their act to Broadway and it's enormous. That's like the apex of Nichols and May, and all of these incredibly famous people are coming to see them and coming to, befriend them. I mean, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are new friends of theirs. And Julie Andrews is performing across the street and she comes over and, you know, all these writers are there to see them and talking about how much they love them. And Elaine is such an intensely shy person that this is like, "Whoa, I don't like this. And I don't like that now we are so famous, we can't experiment and we can't do things that are new. We're just giving people what they want.” And I think that started to wear at them and wear at their relationship, because Mike was so good at pleasing people and playing the game, and Elaine is like, "It's not interesting to me if it's not fresh." After several months on Broadway, she's like, "I'm out. I don't want to do this anymore."

AMY: I mean, think about walking away from something like that. I'm raking in the money. I'm just doing the formulaic thing that people like. I can almost do it in my sleep at this point. A lot of people would have been like, This is a good gig. But no, she needed to do something new and different. So she, you know, transitions from performing with Mike Nichols to embarking on her own solo career. In your book, Carrie, you cover that period from 1961 to 1967 under the chapter heading, “What the Hell Happened to Elaine May?” She's kind of struggling, while Mike Nichols is off being completely successful. He directs the Broadway production of “Barefoot in the Park.” He does the Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? followed by The Graduate in 1967. So he's doing A-okay. But Elaine is... where is she? What's she doing? Flash forward to 1968. Seemingly out of the blue, Elaine May is tapped to write, direct, and star in a feature film called A New Leaf.

CARRIE: Yeah, she really was struggling for a long time. And she finds this story in Alfred Hitchcock's Omnibus magazine, and it's about a man who decides he's gonna marry this woman, and then kill her, and she's like, "Oh, this is the perfect idea for a screenplay." And at the time Hollywood's going through this huge shift where the system is struggling. It feels unhip. And Paramount, in particular, they decide, “Alright, here's the new plan going forward. Our new stars now are writers and directors and filmmakers and young people doing cool things.” And there's some uproar, a little bit, in Hollywood where there hadn't been many women behind the camera at all. And when Elaine's agent went to sell this script to Paramount, he really spun it and was like, "You know, you could get her to direct too. It would look really good. She's a woman!" And she's like, "Wait, wait a second. I wanted director approval, but I don't want to direct it." And they're like, "Well, we can't do it unless you agree to direct. it." And she's like, "Uh, okay, I guess I'll do that." And then she wants star approval. They want to cast Carol Channing in this role, and she's like, "No, no, no, she's all wrong for it. The woman has to sort of fade into the background." And they're like, "Well, then, why don't you play it?" And again, she's like, "What?" And really is thrown into this situation where she's a complete novice and has never directed anything, knows nothing about a film set. Now all of a sudden she's in charge of an entire film production, also at the same time only making like 50, 000 to do all of it. Meanwhile her co-star Walter Matthau and the producer on the film are getting a ton more money. And they're really selling her on this like, "We can't make this movie unless you agree to do all of this." And I think they kind of set her up to fail in a way, and that sparked this underdog mentality in her of like, "Well, I'll show them."

KIM: Yeah. So she's in this crazy situation and she's under all this pressure, you know. What happens?

CARRIE: On the first day they ask her where she wants to put the camera. And she doesn't know what the camera even looks like. She looks at the lighting and is like, Oh, I think that's maybe the camera. And she just says, "I don't know." I remember she described it as like a hush fell over everybody. So, you know, she doesn't know what she's doing. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, how would you? She had no experience in that. It's like, all three of us are writers, but it's like, if somebody just said, Okay, direct a movie now, you know, we didn't go to film school! How would we know?!

CARRIE: Exactly! And no one is mentoring her, you know? Like when Mike went to make Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Billy Wilder was helping him. He had him as a mentor, and Elaine May didn't have that. So she doesn't know that you can't just shoot a wide master shot as if you're filming a play. You have to do another setup where you're shooting close up of the one person, and then you do another shot where you're shooting the close up of the second person. And suddenly she's like, "Oh, I have to go back and redo all of this to get this coverage." And she's a perfectionist. I think as a writer, she could see in her mind every single version or permutation of a scene, and on stage, that's very easy. You have rehearsal time. It doesn't cost you really anything. And on film, it's extremely costly. And she's shooting an enormous amount of material and falls way behind schedule. Producers come out and try to control the situation. And then they're frazzled and they go back to Paramount and they're like, "She's insane. She cannot be controlled. What is going on here? We're gonna have to take over the picture," and they're like, "Yeah, it's gonna be fine. " And then it's time to edit. So then editing goes on way too long. She has a version that she really likes. It's three hours long. It's full of murder. It's way darker than anyone had really expected when they read the script. And Paramount is like, "No way lady! What are you doing?! What is this?!" And immediately try to recut the film, and so she's like, "Well now this isn't my movie. You've completely defanged it. You've completely ruined it. It's not the thing I wrote. It's not the thing I directed. It's your movie. I don't want to be associated with it. You either let me recut it my way or you take my name off the picture." And they're like, "No, we're not doing that." They're threatening to sue her for breach of contract. She's threatening to sue them for breach of contract. And finally they take it all the way to a judge who tried the Rosenberg case. And they played Paramount's version of the movie, and the judge is howling with laughter and he's like, "Her version could be funny, but this is great. Put it out. I don't see what's wrong with this. Put it out." And I think she had this big feeling of betrayal, which is, you know, a common theme throughout her work. It goes back to the childhood thing again, like people are going to betray her. So she had this big distrust in the studios, even though the film ended up being a success.

 AMY: I know, you're, hearing about this complete hot mess of a production and of course you're thinking to yourself, "This movie is going to be also a hot mess." And it actually is not at all. Carrie, uh, could you do us a favor and read from your book where you talk about the response to this film?

CARRIE: Critics for the most part loved the film and loved her both as an actor and a director. In a warm review for The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel wrote: “Ms. May writes and directs with uncommon grace,” and compared A New Leaf to It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby. “Miss May may be right,” Vincent Canby wrote for The New York Times. “Her version may be better than Paramount's. And theoretically anyway, not having seen the other version, I'm on her side. Still, the movie is so nutty and so funny, so happily reminiscent of the screwball comedies people aren't supposed to be able to make anymore, I'm quite satisfied to let things stand.”  By 1972, A New Leaf had grossed 5 million. And was nominated for two Golden Globes for Best Picture and Best Actress, and a Writers Guild of America award. Had the lawsuit not taken up most of the press coverage, and had Elaine actually participated in its promotion, it might have done even better. Not that it mattered. She had delivered great reviews and made paramount money, and that was enough. Elaine didn't just survive by the skin of her teeth, she found herself suddenly established and respected. A member of the Directors Guild of America, only the third woman, and already at work on her next film, a second chance she had predicted she somehow would get. “Will you do anything different in your next movie?” a New York Times journalist asked her. She thought for some time. “Yes,” she said. “Everything.”

AMY: I will say though, I think I would have liked her version of it.

KIM: Yeah. I wish we could see it. 

CARRIE: I agree, it would have been fascinating to see. And it's long been Hollywood lore or urban legend, you know? Where is “the May cut?” When will we see “the May cut?” And who has it? And what have they done with it? And the sad truth is, I am 90 percent sure that it's been lost. If Elaine owned it, my theory is she would have released it by now. The Paramount archives, they searched for it there, they couldn't find anything. You know, they did mention, "Sometimes, you know, things come up that we're shocked to find.We never want to say something is lost for good, but right now, we don't know where it is." Yes, the script for “the May cut” exists, and I'm going to be honest. It's kind of a mess. I can see the final version being a mess. But I still want to see it, you know? 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. It's like almost an academic thing as someone who studied her, you know, you want to have those missing pieces filled in. 

AMY: If she had had the opportunity to really go so dark with all these murders and everything that she wanted to do, I think I would have been totally there for that film. But I did like this one. It made me laugh a lot.

KIM: I love the way it subverted the romantic comedy idea. There's so many things about it that are unusual and I feel like must be so uniquely Elaine. 

CARRIE: I think it's funny that it's her warmest film, in my opinion, and it's about murder.

KIM: Yeah. 

CARRIE: It's about blackmail. It's about a man killing his wife. And I think she's so good on screen, it makes me wish really that she had performed more in front of the camera. It's almost like she's playing a version of herself, because she really mined her own foibles and idiosyncrasies, you know, the sloppiness and the crumbs everywhere, and tripping over her own feet, and price tags still attached to her clothes, like that sort of absent mindedness.

AMY: That nightgown scene, thescene where he's helping her get into the nightgown. The gag just continued and continued, and it never stopped being funny. It was so good.

KIM: Yeah. And it's in your book. You have the behind the scenes of that, right? 

CARRIE: You know, this is her genius as a director. She wants to elicit a certain response from Matthau as he's trying to get her out of this nightgown that she has on in the wrong way, and she really did sew herself into it. So he's like pulling all these layers over and he really is confused, genuinely, like “What? How? Where are you? How do you get out of this thing?” Oh, the first time I saw it, cackling, I couldn't stop laughing. Just brilliant. Today, if you had a scene like that in a movie, an executive somewhere is going to say, "Do we really need this?" Back then, you could put a scene like this in, where it doesn't move the movie along at all. It has no narrative purpose. It doesn't tell you anything more about either character. It's just funny, and sometimes that's okay. You can have something superfluous in a movie that's just like a gag and it's amazing.

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: Although I did see tenderness from Walter Matthau's character towards Henrietta in that moment. I got a spark of like, "Oh, wait, he married her to kill her, but he's helping her right now." And there is this little spark…

KIM: Yeah. Which is why it worked. I feel like. yeah. Yeah. So, um, she filmed The Heartbreak Kid in 1972 and then Mikey and Nicky in 1976.

And I want to talk about Mikey and Nicky because I saw it a couple of years ago. I really loved it. It's my kind of movie, I guess. It's a 1970s John Cassavetes and I really just thought of it as his film. I didn't really connect that it was an Elaine May film, and I absolutely had no idea of the story behind the making of it. It is wild. It's like the craziest story! 

CARRIE: Yeah, the myth of it has become almost as big as the movie itself, I think. It was, a lot like A New Leaf, where It's a movie she wrote, and the one difference from A New Leaf is it wasn't an adaptation. It was a story that had begun as a very short play that she wrote all the way back when she was in Chicago in the 50s. It's based on people that she knew as a child growing up when her family was loosely involved with the mob in Chicago, with the Syndicate. And, you know, there are these two low-level mob guys who are buddies and one's trying to help take out a hit on the other. It's not funny. I mean, there are moments of comic levity, but I think from the start, that scares everybody. The studio really kind of thought, "Oh, it's going to be a buddy comedy." I don't think they were prepared for how dark it was going to be. But I think they were absolutely apprehensive of how long it could take to make it based on their experience with A New Leaf. And so, you know, true to form, she had shot, I forget, like a hundred thousand feet of film, something insane that was like triple or something the length of Gone With The Wind, and now she has to edit everything, and she's not sticking to the timeline, and she's replacing editors left and right. Her and Cassavetes come in after hours and undo things that the editors did during the day and put it back together. It's just chaos. It's really chaos. And Elaine is like a mad genius, you know? Her room is a pigsty, and she comes to edit every day like in last night's clothes and is so laser-focused on this as the clock is ticking. And she does a series of very clever maneuvers to buy herself more time, and finally, it's like a year or something after they've been editing and Paramount's like, "We need this film. It's ours now." They come to the edit studio in New York, seize the material, and two reels are missing. And they can't cut it unless they have those two reels. It's like a pivotal part of the film. And they sue her for breach of contract again. All of the stuff comes out in the lawsuit where they're like, “She knowingly took those rolls of film.

She knew that we were coming.” Peter Falk is involved, as like aiding and abetting a criminal thievery or something like that, and he's like, "Well, I might have, I don't know. "Uh, and it turns out that her husband at the time took the two reels of film, put them in his car, drove them across state lines to Connecticut, and hid them in the garage of a friend's house in Connecticut, so out of New York jurisdiction. And they're suing each other back and forth. And finally, the court is like, "You cannot use the court to settle your little petty interpersonal business arrangement. Like, stop this. What are you doing?" So they negotiate how to get the film back. They cut it the way they want to cut it, and they just sort of dump it in the theaters, right before Christmas. And yeah, that was a huge moment for Elaine, where she's like, “Wow, now I've been burned twice.” This film is released, and it's not a success. It's in theaters for like a week and the few reviews that it does get are bad. And she would eventually, a couple years later, buy back the rights and recut it. Although her recut is really nothing major. It's really like, you know, nothing that could have dramatically changed the film. Yet when she re-released it, then suddenly it's getting these reviews like, "Oh, how did we miss this film?" And "This is amazing." And "It's one of the best of the Seventies." And she does sort of get her pride back, but that whole experience is really where she cements this reputation of being difficult and being unpredictable and being somebody that a studio can't control. And a studio needs to control their director in a way, you know. They're spending the studio's money. And a lot of directors will say, and I agree with them, you know, the studio loves you when they're courting you and the second you sign a contract you are the enemy. And the studio is willing to do anything to bend you to their will. So, yeah, it really blacklisted her, I think, for a while. It was really hard for her to get another job directing after that because she had this reputation of being insane.

AMY: Yeah. I mean, at times she really does sound like a pain in the ass. But how much also does the fact that she was a woman factor into any of this? You know, would a male director have been able to do some of these things and they would have been like, "Oh, he's a genius. Let him have his way"?

CARRIE: Yes and no. It depends because this is, you know, the height of new Hollywood and you do have these directors who are behaving badly or are behaving, yeah, in unconventional ways and burning company money. You know, you have Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now and like selling off all of his stuff to keep financing it. And you have Peter Bogdanovich making a string of flops that become more and more ambitious. They're getting second chances, or they're figuring out how to do it with their own financing, not relying on the studio system. Elaine gets away with the same behavior in the moment, but I think she has a harder time bouncing back from them the way that men do. I think, you know, there's this idea of "director jail," and the sentences for a woman are a lot longer than they would be for a man. Also the fact that she was unpredictable and sometimes unstable really confirmed all of these ideas that male executives had about women directors, where they thought, you know, they're not tough enough to handle it. They're too emotional. How are they going to do it when they're on their period? All this so, like, incredibly cliched, sexist, and just, like, dumb hypotheses. They have Elaine now to point to, and they say, "See, we were right. "And it's the end of the 70s. The feminist movement is in a free fall, and suddenly now the tide is starting to turn and the executives are like, "Oh yeah, actually we don't have to pretend anymore. We don't have to commit to this performance of equality because no one else really cares anymore." And so, yeah, you know, “two strikes, you're out, kid.” It was a huge detriment to her own career, but it was also a huge detriment to other women in the industry and other women getting chances. And, you know, that's sexism at work again, because none of these other guys who were getting put in "director jail" or behaving badly and failing, none of them had to worry about carrying the future of their entire gender on their back. None of them had that added pressure of, “If I fail, every guy is going to be set back like a five years.” That, I think, is a pressure that she was not equipped for. And I also think it didn't concern her. I think selfishly in a way, good and bad, you know, why should she have to care about carrying an entire population of people on her back? But at the same time, that was the reality. She was. And she had no concern for that and was doing things her way. And so it really was a huge turning point, not only in her own career, but in the careers of other women who were aspiring to direct in the studio system in the late 70s and early 80s.

KIM: Okay, so after all this, she basically becomes a script doctor on numerous films. So she's not directing anymore because all this happened and she's basically in “director jail.” But she ends up working on things like Tootsie and The Birdcage. And those things are often overlooked, but they actually had a really big impact on Hollywood. What do you think her contribution was to these films that she worked on?

CARRIE: Well, with films that she really did script doctor or work behind the scenes on like Reds or Tootsie, they really should have a "written by Elaine May" credit. She did incredible, substantial work on both of them. I mean, especially on Tootsie. She created the Bill Murray character. She fleshed out Terri Garr's character. She fleshes out Jessica Lange's character. Gives her the backstory, gives her, you know, the monologue that hands Lange the supporting actress Oscar that year. It really is incredible the amount of work she did on Tootsie. And she wouldn't take credit for things like that because she cared so much about the other writer. And in that situation, at least, she had been told that he knew she was going to come in and fix the script. And then it turned out he didn't, and she really felt like “I betrayed another writer, and so I really don't want credit on this and I don't wanna ever do this again for credit because I feel like that's a betrayal to other writers. They should still get the credit, even if I'm doing work.” And at the same time, you know, it lets her off the hook a little bit too, because if she's a script doctor and she's not having outward-facing credit, if a movie is a huge success, word is going to go around behind the scenes in the industry. “Elaine May saved it.” And that's going to get her more work. But, you know, if it's a flop, she's not associated with it. The few films she wrote with credit, The Birdcage and Primary Colors, they were directed by Mike, the one person where she knows "If I give him my movie, he's not going to mess it up." I think she kind of reached this point in her career where she knew what method of working suited her style best and suited her need for control, but also her need for privacy. 

KIM: She comes across, um, and I think even in your talking about the work she did with Mike Nichols later on, she comes across in your book as incredibly loyal. But she's also been described as "a prickly genius" at the same time. Do you think this prickly genius idea, did it influence her relationship with some of her collaborators? And did it also play into how people received her work?

CARRIE: I think that reputation played out more with executives and non-creative people and their interpretation of how she was to work with. With her collaborators, they were always people who had similar sensibilities as her. You know, Warren Beatty is somebody who you could also call a prickly genius, and they worked so well together because they both were kind of crazy, and really perfectionists, and really like, "We like to fight. We like to argue about the script, and if we're not arguing about the script, maybe it's not good enough." Same thing with Mike. Mike knew how to work with her. He knew how to rein in the prickly side and also, you know, let her loose, but hold on to her with a foot on the ground, be the person who anchors her while she goes off on these flights of fancy. Um, John Cassavetes, another prickly genius. She worked a lot behind the scenes with Bill Murray — also somebody who I just think was on the same wavelength as her. Yeah, everyone that she really collaborated closely with she was extremely loyal to and they were extremely loyal to her. But yeah, I think if you were good to Elaine, then she was going to be good to you, and she would be very loyal in that sense then. But if you were a studio executive who was going to come in and screw with her film, the prickly side could turn on.

AMY: One of my favorite quotes from your book, I don't remember who said it, but, uh, it was the quote, "She seemed like a woman who would murder you." 

CARRIE: Yeah. 

AMY: I think what you did was very daunting in writing this biography of her. I mean, I know that you would have loved to have her involvement in the writing of this book, and you did not. It's almost like that, um, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" kind of article, that you had to speak to all of the people around her to get this story. And in the beginning of your book, you actually talk about the fact that you live not too far from where she lives in New York and you would harbor these fantasies of running into her, but I'm sure there's a little bit of trepidation there too. What do you think she would say about this book?

CARRIE: Oh my God. I've had so many stress dreams about it! I've had so many stress dreams, not with what she would say, but, um, I have these stress dreams where Jeannie Berlin is yelling at me, where I'm just like being completely verbally eviscerated by Jeannie (who by all accounts is a very nice woman actually. I would love to be friends with Jeannie.)

AMY: Just to remind listeners, Jeannie Berlin is Elaine May's daughter.

CARRIE: Elaine, I think, would just play dumb. I think she would play dumb. I think that's kind of her go-to response when she's backed into a corner or when she doesn't want to comment on something or doesn't want to be recognized or when she doesn't want praise for anything. She sort of is like, "Well, I don't know what you're talking about." She'd be like, "Oh, there's a book about me? I didn't know." I have a friend who did see her on the street one time and said something like, "Excuse me, are you Elaine May?" (And like, it's unmistakably Elaine.) And she said she looked at her for like a beat and said, "No. But I know her very well." And, like, that's the sort of, like, reaction that I think I would get from her. I mean, at the same time, I'm totally terrified. I'm totally terrified of what I would…

AMY: I'm having stress dreams for you! I literally am having stress dreams for you, but at the same time, I'm so happy that you wrote this book. 

KIM: Yeah. It's really, really good.

CARRIE: Thank you.

KIM: Carrie, it was a delight to have you on the show, and I'm excited to actually see Ishtar for the first time. I haven't seen it yet, and after reading your book, I'm like, “I'm going to watch it, for May.”

CARRIE: Oh my god, you must! It's on Criterion Channel right now.

KIM: Great. I will watch.

AMY: I just watched it yesterday for the first time. The only thing I had ever known about it was the fact that it's like the world's biggest Hollywood bomb ever, right? So of course, why, why would I watch it? I wouldn't watch it. So it's like "Steer clear of Ishtar." And then so I started watching it yesterday and I'm like, “What the heck?” This is like all those sort of “Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson” buddy movies. Dumb and Dumber. It was a precursor to all of those films in the Nineties where you're totally laughing out loud. I didn't have any concept of what this film was about. I thought it was like Lawrence of Arabia or something. I don't even think I knew it was a comedy. 

KIM: Totally.

AMY: Do not just fall for the "Ishtar is the worst movie ever." You have to judge for yourself. 

KIM: Yeah.​

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Patreon members, I'd love for you to join me, Amy, next week for a discussion on 7 Middaugh, a very special house in Brooklyn Heights once upon a time, whose tenants happened to be some of the 20th century's most talented young creatives. Think a literary version of the sitcom “Friends.” The rest of you can join us back here in two weeks. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.