Cinema: Some are More Yossarian than Others

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the Broadway show, the comedians split amicably—only to rejoin when Elaine wrote A Matter of Position, a comedy starring Mike as a manic market researcher depressively afraid that people would hate him. They did. They also hated the play, which folded in Philadelphia after 17 performances. "It was not a pleasant experience," admits Mike. "I behaved very badly toward Elaine." She abandoned performing for about six years. Mike, as he says, "might have been Dick Cavett today" except for Saint Subber's stomach. The producer owned a play by a TV comedy writer named Neil Simon. He remembered a funnyman who might just be able to direct. "Mike had misgivings and doubts," Saint Subber recalls. "He said, 'Why do you come to me?' I said, 'I chose you because I thought it out in my stomach. In the theater all you have are instincts.'"

Sharp Enough to Slice

Nichols remembers: "The first day of rehearsal, I knew, my God, this is it! It is as though you have one eye, and you're on a road and all of a sudden your eye lights up, and you look down and you know, 'I'm an engine!' " An engine that could. The play was called Barefoot in the Park.

What made it a smash hit, and far more than an expanded honeymooners skit, was the Nichols style: timing, vibrance and a slavish attention to detail. Nichols and failure became antonyms. Barefoot was followed by The Knack, Luv and The Odd Couple. The director came to resemble Somerset Maugham's nouveau novelist, Alroy Kear, who read that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. "If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest."

Producer Alexander Cohen still remembers with awe when Nichols called him one night to rage: "This theater is in total darkness!" One of the 30 lamps on the balcony rail was flickering. Saint Subber's marrow freezes when he remembers Nichols' insistence that The Odd Couple set be repainted 24 hours before opening. When he cast Barefoot, Nichols was even more demanding. "Mike insisted on getting a real telephone man or a taxicab driver to play the telephone man," recalls Subber. "I thought: this has to be a put-on. But I ended up getting a cab driver—and he is now an actor: Herb Edleman."

Though audiences could no longer feel it, Nichols' tongue was still sharp enough to slice. Richard Burton likes to retell the story of Walter Matthau, "a frenetic soul, and he finally blew his stack at Nichols' Odd Couple direction. 'You're emasculating me,' Walter cried. 'Give me back my balls!' From out front, Mike called back: 'Props.' "

Mike was Burton's kind of boy. As the Liz-Dick scandale deepened during the filming of Cleopatra, Burton recalls, "Ninety percent of our friends avoided our eyes. Mike flew to Rome from New York to be with us." Nichols stayed by Elizabeth's side when Burton went off to make another film. Favors like that one remembers. In 1966, the Welshman and his lady were signed for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Elizabeth insisted on Nichols as director. Virginia Woolf could have been a mini-Cleopatra, but its be-low-the-belt punches intrigued critics and audiences. The second time out, with Dustin Hoffman and The Graduate, he