Mike Nichols ... registered nurse

The closest I ever got to Mike Nichols, who died Wednesday at age 82, was during one of my very first jobs in New York, as a production assistant on the film adaptation of the Nora Ephron novel Heartburn, which Nichols directed.

No. Strike that. That was the closest I ever physically got to Nichols, sure, but being one of the lowliest crewmembers on a major motion picture wouldn’t likely pierce my top-ten list of Mike Nichols encounters ... that is, if I had a top-ten list of Mike Nichols encounters.

I’ll start again.

The closest I ever got to Mike Nichols was in a Los Angeles living room when I was maybe five years old. My parents had an old comedy record by Nichols and May —May being Elaine May, the actress, writer and director in her own right, who partnered with Nichols through the late 1950s and early ‘60s doing comic sketches in clubs, on radio and TV, and eventually in a Broadway show that ran for over 300 performances. But I’m getting ahead of myself — something easy to do when considering the length and breadth of Nichol’s career.

The record, Nichols and May Examine Doctors, is representative of the duo, their point-counterpoint comedy, rich with the great timing that so many other remembrances are praising today, imbued with an improvisational feel that actually comes from years of study and hours of rehearsal — but I honestly don’t remember much of it. Or, rather, I don’t remember much of it the way I remember one track on the record, which feels as vivid to me today as it did a generation ago, even as the actual subject matter, the core of the joke, has grown terribly dated and stale.

The record jacket lists the bit as “Nichols and May at Work,” but I remember it as “My son the registered nurse” (the wisdom of the Internet seems to title this piece “My son ... the nurse” — so much for my vivid memory), and the humor, ostensibly, comes from a son having to confess to his mother that he has made a tough decision about his future and the path his life will take.

“Mom, I know what I’d like to do with my life. It will take some sacrifice on all our parts ..." Nichols tells May, playing off the mother-son dynamic that was one of their signature formats. May gasps with anticipation — and with pride — Nichols has something big to tell her.

“I want to be,” Nichols says, “a registered nurse.”

Not that funny, right? Not by contemporary standards, anyway. What is so absurd about a young man thinking about nursing? Even if the profession still comes loaded with biases and preconceptions rooted in its gender-specific roots, laughing at the prospect of a male nurse is hardly the stuff of highbrow, Broadway-caliber, Grammy-winning humor, is it?

But, first, grant that this was a really long time ago ... and, second, much more important, listen to the recording. The reason this is called “Nichols and May at Work” is because the track is not a finished product, it is the beginning improvisations around an idea — and it is filled with laughter. Yes, they are both laughing at a joke that is extremely dated, but the laughter — deep, mutual, out of control — transcends its inspiration.

It is infectious. It was for a five-year-old kid. It is, at least for me, now.

What is off, to my eye, is not the misses so much as it is that a man who worked so much and made so many influential movies did so without cementing anything like a signature style. There is not a “Mike Nichols film,” in the classic auteur sense. There is no signature visual style, there is not really a stock cast, there is no unity of subject matter.

But, if you look close enough, there might be a theme that permeates much of his work: The outsider.

Nichols was born in Germany in 1931, fleeing the Nazi’s at age 8, he came to the U.S. famously knowing only two phrases, “I do not speak English,” and “Please don’t kiss me.” But even before that, Nichols was marked as “other,” after losing all his hair at age four as a side effect from a vaccination. He was, naturally, teased as a child, and wore wigs the rest of his life.

So, whether it is the isolation felt by the Woolfs, played by acting giants Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the oddly cast newcomer Dustin Hoffman as the former Harvard track star and Lampoon editor alienated by post-graduate suburban life in The Graduate, the whistleblower Karen Silkwood (played by Meryl Streep), or the gay couple at the heart of The Bird Cage, Nichols spent a lifetime bringing humanity to people that felt they didn’t always fit or that a broader society didn’t always acknowledge.

But to only talk about the film work is to give Mike Nichols short shrift. He was, after all, one of the rare people to “EGOT” — win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award.

He actually won a remarkable nine Tonys, and one of those was for the original Broadway production of The Real Thing, which, I must admit, is another place where Nichols put an indelible stamp on my worldview.

It’s funny, because I usually think of The Real Thing as the play that taught me to love Tom Stoppard, more than I think of it as a Nichols work, but after I saw that production during my first year in New York, I got my hands on an audio version Nichols recorded with the original Broadway cast (which starred Jeremy Irons, Glen Close, Christine Baranski and a young Cynthia Nixon), and, because I listened to it over and over — on car trips, while I read the text, as I fell asleep — it is Mike Nichols’ direction that I hear in my head when I recall all of that classic Stoppard dialogue.

The Real Thing is another entry in the Nichols canon that details the relationships between men and women and how they are motivated, complicated, enriched, destroyed and reinvigorated by sex. And while it is not particularly original to note that this all happens, Nichols’ perspective makes these near-obvious and nearly universal observations unique and deeply personal.

Be it Henry’s jealousy in The Real Thing, Ben’s discomfort in The Graduate, or Jonathan’s perpetual lack of satisfaction in Carnal Knowledge, Nichols made these byproducts of 20th Century alienation and interrelation deeply personal. You, as part of the audience, feel them in your gut.

Like a belly laugh.

Yeah, the biases and barriers that confront many of the characters in much of the Nichols catalogue might seem like a bit of a time capsule today, but the emotions transcend the subject, as they do for me with the nurse sketch. And, if I am to venture a guess, it will be the emotions that will, for a lot of people, keep Nichols close, even as the temporal world moves on.