Elaine May does not do interviews. Not when she is the subject. But she agreed to interview her longtime friend Julian Schlossberg, the theatrical producer and author of the new memoir My First Book—Part 2, in front of a small group of journalists.
So here we are at Sardi’s, around two p.m. on a recent weekday. Seated with me around a corner table after the interview has concluded are May; May’s daughter, the actress Jeannie Berlin (The Heartbreak Kid); and actress-director Renée Taylor (you know her from The Nanny and her hit one-woman show, My Life on a Diet).
May said she was nervous (to anyone who’d listen), so she focused on the menu, specifically the absence of something she remembers as “deviled bones.”
“I said yes to this because of the beef bones,” she says. “I think that these beef bones were leftover beef from people who would have eaten already. They were for their dogs.” Vincent Sardi is now turning in his grave.
“They were fantastic,” May insists. “If only I could get an old menu.”
Taylor, 91, picks at a plate of pigs in blankets.
How do you know each other?, I ask Berlin of Taylor. “I’ve known her since I’m 13,” Berlin says. “We were both in a play that my mother wrote. It was a children’s play called Rumpelstiltskin.”
“[May] fired me,” Taylor says. “I was dating Joe [Bologna, who became her husband of 52 years], and I came late to the theater, and she said I have to fire you. I said, Why? She said, You’re a bad example to all the young people in the show.” Nonetheless, their friendship endured.
May was already well known for being Mike Nichols’s comedy partner. Their improvised sketches were sophisticated, bright, and lively. He went on to become a major director of plays and movies. She also became a film-and-theater director, if a less prolific one, and an in-demand (mostly uncredited, at her insistence) script doctor. Her films A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, and Mikey and Nicky are considered classics. (Ishtar is another story for another time.)
Berlin was her only child. Did she know all the Nichols and May routines?, I ask. “Of course I did,” she says. “I spent a lot of time at the Golden [Theatre, where An Evening with Nichols and May played 306 performances from October 1960 to October 1961]. They were fantastic.”
By age 10, Berlin was in show business by proximity. I ask May, “When did you know she was funny?” May thinks about it. “She was, like, nine. And she was just talented.”
“When I was really young, you kind of used me to work out one of your exercises for your class. And it was a hard exercise, too,” Berlin says. “I was hooked.”
In 1972, May cast Berlin as Lila, the needy Jewish bride of the shifty, reluctant Lenny (Charles Grodin) in The Heartbreak Kid, which Neil Simon adapted from a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman. On their honeymoon, Lenny meets Kelly, the shiksa of his dreams (Cybill Shepherd). But before he can pursue her, he has to break Lila’s heart. The comic scene between Berlin and Grodin, which involves Berlin eating a very messy egg-salad sandwich, was a career-maker for both of them.
“I made that egg-salad sandwich because I was on a diet,” Berlin recalls.
The film is a wry take on anti-Semitism and class, I offer. “It was only about class,” May says. “It was what it’s like when you see this blonde who’s both rich and beautiful and American.”
Grodin, May recalls, had no idea his character was so rotten until he saw it in a theater. “And they booed him. Well, I told him that I think passion blinds [Lenny].”
The film culminates in an almost operatic ending, with Grodin at the reception for his second wedding, sitting on a banquette, flanked by two children, looking uneasy. The audience realizes he will never grow up.
“We had no end to this movie,” May recalls. “I brought everybody in, real rich people, and he mingled with them and then the son of the A.D. and the son of the producer sat down on either side of him, and he said to them, ‘How old are you?’ One said, ‘I’m 10.’ And the other one said, ‘I’m 10.’ And Chuck said, ‘I was 10.’ And I thought, Well, that’s the end of the movie.”
Berlin, then 22, was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Three years later she starred in the comic mystery Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York. More recent credits include the HBO mini-series The Night Of, the second season of Succession, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, and Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings.
“I’ve been playing way too many mothers,” Berlin says of the last two.
May, now 92, hasn’t retired. She has one screenplay she wrote with the late Stanley Donen, her boyfriend for 10 years, and another one that Berlin has been working on with the playwright Mark Hampton. Dakota Johnson would star, and May would direct. Taylor says May’s going to direct a play she’s written about Taylor’s life with Joe Bologna called “Dying Is No Excuse.”
I ask May, “Could you do a superhero movie?”
“Sure,” she says.
Roger Friedman is the editor and chief correspondent of Showbiz411
