Elaine May is exactly the kind of woman I'd be totally in love with if we had been contemporaries - beautiful, funny, highly intelligent, and Jewish. I would have had competition, though - just about every man whose path she crossed fell immediately in love with her, and for good reason. "Everybody wanted Elaine, and the people who got her couldn't keep her," said her longtime comedy partner Mike Nichols. She was described by the legendary Richard Burton as "too formidable, one of the most intelligent, beautiful, and witty women I had ever met. I hoped I would never see her again.” She was admired and, more importantly, respected, to a degree that was no easy feat for a woman in the 1950s. Elaine May is Awesome.May was born into a Yiddish theater troupe in 1932, and eventually landed the recurring role of a boy named "Benny" in their shows. Constantly travelling around the country, she attended 50 schools by the time she was ten years old and, as a result, became disillusioned with education. After the death of her father at age 11, she and her mother settled in Los Angeles. She attended Hollywood High School briefly, dropped out at age 14, married a toy inventor, got divorced, and began taking acting classes. LA just wasn't for Elaine, though. She needed a fresh start, and like so many other comedy stars, her destiny lay in the city of Chicago.
In 1950, with $7 in her pocket, May hitchhiked to the Windy City with hopes of enrolling in the University of Chicago - the only college she knew of that accepted students with no high school diploma. She began auditing classes - Mike Nichols recalled her coming into his philosophy class, saying "something outrageous", and leaving. Nichols and May quickly became friends, and in 1955 the two "dead broke theater junkies" joined a satirical improv group (yes, apparently those existed in 1955) called the Compass Players.
May's influence soon turned the Players into the hottest ticket in town. She often held court at social functions, with admirers and fellow performers hanging on her every word. None of it seemed to go to her head, though - she welcomed newcomers, including the Players' first black actor, and worked to democratize the troupe's hierarchy. She "took creative leaps" that "improved everyone's work", according to writer Gerald Nachman. She was an incredibly generous performer whose encouragement inspired Nichols to get over his reservations about improvisation. According to Nichols, May "was the only one who had faith in me. I loved it... We had a similar sense of humor and irony... When I was with her I became something more than I had been before."
In 1957, Nichols and May's meteoric rise in the comedy scene led the Compass Players to suggest they strike out on their own (they "were so good, they eventually threw the company off balance," said club manager Jay Landsman). The newly independent team of Nichols and May moved to New York and eventually made their Broadway debut with "An Evening with Nichols and May", a series of semi-improvised sketches. Their brand of humor mixed highbrow and lowbrow, and changed perceptions of what could be possible not only for women in comedy (Producer David Shepherd noted that May specialized in "challenging, sophisticated and worldly women" that "might include the woman as a doctor, a psychiatrist, or an employer") but for comedy in general. At the dawn of the 60s, Nichols and May seemed poised to take over the world.Things didn't quite work out that way, though. May's newfound stardom demanded repetition of the same material, which sapped the joy of improvisation from her work, and she decided to step away from the partnership at the height of their popularity. She spent the rest of the 60s directing theater and in the 70s began working in film as an actress, director, and writer. She wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplays for 1978's Heaven Can Wait and the Bill Clinton satire Primary Colors, as well as 1996's The Birdcage and the criminally underrated Ishtar. More interestingly, she was an uncredited co-writer on the Jim Henson/David Bowie epic Labyrinth, the Dustin Hoffman cross-dressing comedy Tootsie (particularly Bill Murray's scenes), and 1995's Dangerous Minds.
Elaine May was (and is) a comedy pioneer, a brilliant and talented woman, and a role model to people like Lily Tomlin, Tina Fey, and my as-of-yet unborn daughter. She is a Grammy winner, an Academy Award nominee, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. She's pretty awesome.
You should also check out this great interview with Nichols and May that was in Vanity Fair's comedy issue last year (May hadn't done an interview since 1967).
