Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius. St. Martin’s Press, 2024, 400pp., $30.00.
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Published on the heels of Mark Harris’s comprehensive biography Mike Nichols: A Life (2021) comes Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, Carrie Courogen’s equally dense biography of Nichols’s sometimes partner, sometimes friend, sometimes mortal enemy, Elaine May. Courogen’s book is a strong timeline of and candid conversation about May’s life and career, which has now spanned over seven decades, garnering her multiple accolades, awards, and raps on the knuckles both for her immense talent and her seemingly compulsive need to be ornery. Recognized as a writer, performer, director, producer, lover, and pain in the ass, May is perfectly presented by Courogen as a misunderstood eccentric, petulant perfectionist, and meticulous behind-the-scenes script surgeon who saved multiple screenplays from relative obscurity or the round file. Miss May Does Not Exist rightfully and finally puts the spotlight on this underrated comic of stage and screen; however, questions remain by the end of the biography: Can readers agree with Courogen’s argument that May’s bad reputation stems from misogyny, even if she was a “difficult woman”? And, irrespective of what readers believe, is May’s status in the entertainment industry based on her problematic behavior rather than sexism?
That the Hollywood industrial complex is systemically and toxically patriarchal has been much discussed by such feminist film theorists as Joan Mellen, Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell, E. Ann Kaplan, and countless others in the field. And Courogen is equally as effective in establishing thie point, but she does so not by delving into Freudian psychoanalysis or postmodernist jargon. Instead, she gracefully and strategically places simple discussion points throughout the text to keep readers aware of her thesis, making Miss May Does Not Exist accessible and persuasive. Courogen makes a convincing case for adding May to the gallery of greats, a brilliant independent artist (storyteller) but unsung cog in the entertainment machine.
May was born Elaine Berlin in 1932 to middle-to-lower-class Jewish parents just prior to the Depression. She inherited her scrappiness from her father and mother, Jack and Ida, both of whom worked hard in Philadelphia to keep the family’s head above water; and one of whom (Jack) was an actor in the American Yiddish theater. After Jack’s sudden death at the age of forty-seven by heart attack, Ida was left in poverty and forced to move with Elaine to Chicago, where they had to live with Ida’s sister and mob-affiliated brother-in-law. They failed to prosper, and Elaine learned that people, whether under their own volition or otherwise, can disappear without warning, which would jade her and later become a familiar nihilistic trope in her work throughout her career (e.g., the abandoned woman as victim character). The entire family later moved to Los Angeles, where Elaine would bounce around from school to school as an unsuccessful student and would ultimately meet Marvin May, her first husband, at age sixteen (Marvin was nineteen). She married in 1948, had a baby (Jeannie), and two years later divorced. To pay the bills, she takes on some odd jobs and enrolls in an acting class, where she learns Method acting from Maria Ouspenskaya; and, by 1952, she embraces the name Elaine May and follows in her father’s footsteps as a performer, in spite of being a single mother and needing to go back to Chicago to find work. With seven dollars to her name, May starts performing at the Playwrights Theatre Club (which would later become the Compass Players and the Second City) and meets Mike Nichols. They hit it off and become a couple, but not romantically, instead becoming inseparable partners in improvised and scripted comedy until they “separated” in 1961, with occasional “hookups” until his death in 2014.
May and Mike Nichols, 1960. Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
It is during her time as a semi-independent entertainer with Mike Nichols, them being one unit in New York for almost a decade, when the meticulous nature of her process and working voice started to show. May did have her exacting moments with the Compass Players; however, once she wrote and performed with Nichols, who was not as measured as she was, there was no doubt that she became more of a stickler for details and precise organization. Courogen’s perception is that May and Nichols’s act, which was situational, experimental, and scenario-based comedy on stage where two people just converse with one another, comes at the right moment because times were starting to change in the humor/cultural world. Slapstick and vaudeville had lost steam in the 1950s and 1960s, and “free-form, boundary-pushing . . . innovative” comedy (e.g., satire) was becoming the standard. May and Nichols were at the forefront of this fashionable new comedic movement, and May specifically was proving to misogynistic naysayers that women could be and are funny. No longer was comedy a man’s domain. Women like May, Phyllis Diller, Jean Carroll, Moms Mabley, and others who certainly knew their worth were becoming key figures in stand-up as well as theatrical and cinematic comedy. Miss May Does Not Exist, thus, is not just a well-researched biography about a comedic trailblazer; it is also an effective historical document of headstrong women in comedy and their struggles for almost one hundred years.
With that said, however, once May’s significance in the comedy continuum is established and the argument is made that humorous women have been marginalized throughout history (which is true even in contemporary comedy), Courogen’s book’s central thesis starts to lose steam in that much of the rest of May’s career as a film actress, screenwriter, director, and script doctor is deemed by the author as a fight against a patriarchal regime that continuously looked for ways to suppress her immense talent, even if she was difficult to work with. Courogen makes the claim that sexism in Hollywood means a man’s subpar work is generally accepted over and over again while a woman’s brilliant work is in constant need of being proven; and if subpar, she is banished from the industry. This concept has validity, but in the case of May, one must ask: Were May’s films always brilliant, even when she spent enormous time and energy and money attempting to perfect them? Also, how bad were her bad films? Ebbs and flows are bound to happen, and Courogen is transparent about this point, but there are also moments where she claims that much of the negativity surrounding May’s filmmaking style stems from her being a tough woman. As a director, May worked on four films: A New Leaf (1971); The Heartbreak Kid (1972); Mikey and Nicky (1976); and Ishtar (1987). Each of these films is discussed at length in Miss May Does Not Exist, and with each film she ran into multiple problems of her making that would make most producers panic and cringe.
She ran over budget and shot literally miles of film to get the right shot. She would spend months and months filming, and then months and months editing the huge amount of film she shot. She sometimes would take dozens, if not hundreds, of takes, much to her actors’ dismay. She was verbally rough with her crew and her performers. She would regularly and incessantly revise her scripts. She was indecisive and unfocused. An example of all this can be found in Mikey and Nicky, which has become notorious for multiple reasons, most especially because Paramount was so upset with her hiding the dailies from the company and breaching her contract that the producers resorted to calling the police to get the rolls of film back: “New York sheriffs were sent, guns drawn, to the editing studio to collect the film, protocol Elaine found hilarious in its excessiveness.” On top of all of that, May’s films, even if up for Golden Globes and Oscars, hardly ever made much money for the production companies, nor were they really critical darlings (Ishtar, in particular, is still considered one of the worst films ever made). Her professional career was inconsistent; so, for Courogen to simply blame misogyny on her lack of success is a bit short-sighted. (To further prove this point, one thinks of Francis Ford Coppola or Stanley Kubrick or David Fincher, and how they have been vilified for similar issues throughout their careers; and not once has law enforcement been involved.)
May receives the Medal of Arts Award from President Obama in 2012. Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Ultimately, May stopped directing films and realized that her stronger talents were acting and screenwriting; that the scrupulous nature of her professional process was a better fit in these two professions than in being behind the camera. Credited or uncredited, she was involved in the writing of Heaven Can Wait (1982); Tootsie (1982); The Birdcage (1996); Primary Colors (1998); Down to Earth (1998), and a slew of others. The quality of her writing and her rewrites is unparalleled, and that includes her playwriting skills as well as her screenplay writing. As mentioned above, there is no doubt May has had clunkers, but what comes through in Courogen’s biography is her tenacity. May has never given up even in the face of adversity and scrutiny; in fact, she continues to work even at the age of ninety-two, recently winning her first Tony for Best Leading Actress in a Play for The Waverly Gallery (2019). Her genius is finally being addressed and recognized.
Miss May Does Not Exist, overall, is an impressive biography about May’s canon of work and, at times, her personal relationships with her husbands and boyfriends – Marvin Irving May, Sheldon Harnick, David L. Rubinfine, and recently Stanley Donen – and friends – Nichols, Dustin Hoffman, and Warren Beatty, among other big name celebrities. But where Courogen might have been more persuasive is in her argument that May’s career never really took off because she was a “difficult woman.” It is quite possible – and this is something the book perhaps unintentionally shows – that May’s star did not burn brighter than it did because she was just plain difficult.
