“We’re very weird about our president,” Mike Nichols said, with a certain weird prescience, as we sat in his 57th Street office a week before Lewinskygate blew up and spattered the land. “I was thinking about how much the problems of our puritanism are like a kid growing up – you find out that the lady who was always with Dad when you visited wasn’t his secretary. And then you say, ‘That bastard! How could he do it to Mom?’ Then you get a little older and your own life gets lived, and you say, ‘Oh, Dad, I wish you were here so I could tell you I understand and I’m sorry I was such a little twit.’”
He smiled and raised his eyebrows, looking, all at once and startlingly, like a hopeful boy. Mike Nichols is 66 now, and it comes as something of a shock to see those familiar and eminently caricaturable features – the Holbein nose, the small slitty eyes – re-situated in the round face of a senior citizen. “A lot of people go through that,” he said, “and in some weird way, the country has to go through it. We’re the only place in civilization that makes this schism: ‘He’s a great man. He’s great with people. Unfortunately, he can’t keep his pants zipped.’ What if it’s the same thing? We have never asked that question. Why haven’t we asked this question?”
Nichols was explaining why he had decided, in February 1996, to put up $1.5 million of his own money, bidding against several Hollywood studios, for the movie rights to the novel Primary Colors. Nichols won the auction, not just because of the sum he offered but because, he said, “I had an advantage over a studio. I knew what I wanted to do with the book.” And because he alone among the bidders had the artistic focus to utter a single magic word about the project to Kathy Robbins, the literary agent of “Anonymous,” a.k.a. Joe Klein.
“I said, ‘It’s about honor,’” Nichols recalled. “In my view, that’s movies’ favorite subject. The movies I love most – we love most – are about honor. Lawrence of Arabia. It’s in all the buddy movies. It’s deep in the heart of almost any serious movie, because it’s always the issue at stake. Movies love friendship. They love unconsummated passion. They love nonsexual love. And somehow honor is always involved.”
And what did honor have to do with Primary Colors?
“It asks the question, where does honor lie now, now that things are as we know them to be?” Nichols said. “And what does it take to be president now? And who do we lose because of this gauntlet that they have to run? Who’s unable to run the gauntlet? And who survives the gauntlet? What have we done? What are we doing? It’s really the question that everybody is asking all the time. There is almost no other question.”
The events of the past month have, to put it mildly, borne out Nichols’s assertion. And now, in a few weeks, his movie adaptation of Primary Colors (its screenplay written by Elaine May) will premiere, in a national climate about which virtually the only guarantee seems to be that questions of presidential honor aren’t going to get any less pressing.
Mike Nichols, however, thinks Bill Clinton’s problems are less a matter of honor than of a certain fixation on the part of the president’s critics and the press.
“I think that there’s a complicated mixture of parental and sexual in our contemplation of the president,” he says. “Depending, of course, on the president. If he’s more parental, we’re more parental. If he’s younger and still in his sexual prime, then we’re more sexual in that response to him. And I think there’s all the pain of finding out that Daddy cheated on Mommy.
“It’s a very adolescent thing,” Nichols says. “Everybody remembers when you’re first coming upon sex and you can’t understand how people get through their day. I remember that so clearly from college. Why isn’t everybody talking about it? And how are you supposed to get through all this other stuff when the nights have this in it?
“In some ways, maybe the relative youth of our nation is involved in our confusion about public and private acts. As everybody keeps saying, in France they have no problem. Private acts are private acts. And that’s that. They long ago figured out that men who get a lot accomplished have powerful libidos. What’s the problem?”
Well, there is a problem, according to more and more professional opinion-givers. There are, of course, the predictable anti-Clintonites on the right, ranging from Richard Mellon Scaife to George Will, who feel that Lewinsky’s is just the latest gate in this administration, a cell in a cancer of malfeasance that includes Whitewater, Vince Foster, Travelgate, and campaign-contribution abuse at the very top of the list. There are, of course, Maureen Dowd and Michael Kelly and Sam Donaldson, commenting from somewhere in the unincorporated center, appearing to feel roughly the same way, with a little bit of salt sprinkled on it. Had Clinton only come forth and fessed up immediately after Kenneth Starr Tripped upon Monica Lewinsky, one of the Major Commentators told me last week in Washington, he might very well have been forgiven; it’s the steady pattern of Doing Just As He Pleases that will finally sink him.
And then, in his own unique spot on the left, sits George Stephanopoulos, the very picture of disingenuous telegenic regret, battening on the misery of his former idol.
And at the other end of the forgiveness spectrum are the likes of Tina Brown, who, after attending the White House dinner for Tony Blair, gushed, “Forget the dog-in-the-manger, down-in-the-mouth neo-puritanism of the op-ed tumbrel drivers, and see him instead as … a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex).” And Mike Nichols himself, who has socialized with the Clintons in Los Angeles and on Martha’s Vineyard, where Nichols and his wife, Diane Sawyer, have a house.
“I’ve met the president about half-dozen times,” Nichols says. “I first met him at a fund-raiser that Elaine and I did for them, way before the election, in L.A. And we were both astonished at how present they were. They’re very startling when you meet them. It’s absolutely the opposite of the experience of meeting the candidate, let’s say, and his wife. Or the president and the First Lady. And there’s a great remove and a certain amount of boilerplate. Not at all. They’re right there. They’re like the people you know. They look you in the eye, and they say new things that they just thought of. They’re alive. And present. And it’s very startling and impressive and nice. They’re very, very nice.”
Nichols and Sawyer most recently saw the Clintons last summer on the Vineyard: “It was at a big party, and he came over to say hello.”
“Did he say anything about the movie?”
Nichols gives me a look. “No,” he says. “He asked me about the Vineyard, and I said that I’d been coming there for years, that I used to visit Lillian Hellman every summer, and he said, oh, he wished he had met her. That would have been wonderful. And that he was such a fan of Dashiell Hammett, and that he had always thought that if Faulkner wrote detective stories, he would have been Hammett. For a president to say that takes your breath away. You know, the last conversation about art that I know of a president participating in was when Eisenhower said to Lenny Bernstein, ‘I don’t like them airs and barcaroles. Give me a good march.’” Nichols laughs. “He actually said that. Bernstein was beside himself. And he named a composition Arias and Barcaroles.”
I ask Nichols whether he noticed any change in the president between the first time he met him and the most recent. “Well, my meetings with him have always been short and casual,” he says. “You know, I wouldn’t presume, even to myself, to make such judgments. In my mind I have this fantasy in which he is discouraged and figures if we don’t let him move in any direction, the hell with it. But I think that is in my mind.”
Does all this make Nichols a not-so-crypto Clinton flack? There are those who would put Nichols, along with all those showbiz types, who live by appearances and certainly not by moral fiber, anyway, deep in this charismatic president’s pocket. (And he in theirs, as is evident in everything from his close association with the principals of DreamWorks to the guest list of just about any major White House function.)
The movie of Primary Colors, the critics would claim, is tainted high and low, and not just by Nichols: They would cite the fact that Edgar Bronfman Jr., who controls Universal Studios (which is releasing the picture), is a major Clinton contributor. They would claim that John Travolta entered into some sort of unholy deal with the president, extracting his promise to help remedy the plight of German Scientologists in return for a sympathetic portrayal in Primary Colors. They would charge that Billy Bob Thornton, who plays the James Carville character, Richard Jemmons, in the movie, was brought into the project for similarly nefarious purposes by Thornton’s close friend and fellow Arkansan, F.O.B.-in-chief Harry Thomason… .
And the critics wouldn’t be totally off base. One of the many amazing things about the president is his omnivorous ability to reach out and put the touch on virtually anyone, from David Geffen to a young woman I met recently, the assistant to a well-known (and conservative) media figure, who once found herself, for a heart-stopping few minutes, one-on-one with Clinton. “He acted as if he had all the time in the world for me,” she sighed.
What kind of man survives the gauntlet of a presidential campaign? Primary Colors, the novel, asked the question, at length and poignantly, about its nakedly Clintonesque candidate Jack Stanton, and now Primary Colors, the movie, is asking it again, even more poignantly, at a time when the country can talk about little else. At such a time – good God! – of endlessly interweaving rumors and facts and news and parody, isn’t a movie that gives us more of the same, in a past-tense factoidal fable of the ‘92 presidential primaries … a bit much?
It isn’t. While the tickle of “Anonymous” was in its winking signal that the book’s journalistically unprintable gossip was, deep down, really journalism, we’ve gone a long way down that road in the two years since: Winking signals are scarcely needed anymore. And whatever the tabloids say, Primary Colors the movie is neither political fellatio nor artistic failure. It has not been, nor will it be, outstripped by the news.
Yes, it’s a treasure house of à clef nudges: Travolta and Emma Thompson as southern governor Jack Stanton and wife Susan (the Clintons); Adrian Lester as campaign manager Henry Burton (think Stephanopoulos); Thornton as the Carville-esque strategist Jemmons; Maura Tierney as coordinator Daisy Green (Mandy Grunwald); Kathy Bates as dirt-deflector Libby Holden (Betsey Wright); Larry Hagman as a decent former Florida governor with a besmirched background (take your pick); Gia Carides as whistle-blowing floozy Cashmere McLeod (Gennifer Flowers).
But the chief power of Primary Colors derives from the metaphorical light it sheds on the Clintons’ true-life characters and relationship, and on what has come to be regarded with a derisive snort as the American Political Process. Beyond the salt-peanuts fun of fantasy-meets-reality (and beyond a picture like Wag the Dog, which is pure salt peanuts), Primary Colors is – from its first flag-waving moments just before the New Hampshire primary to its final scene at Jack Stanton’s inaugural ball, in its perfect pacing and sublime ensemble acting – an artistically independent work.
Much overlooked in the brouhaha over the authorship of Primary Colors was the fact that it was no potboiler but a real novel, which Klein (in intricate collaboration with Random House’s Dan Menaker) brought off with brio. Yet the book’s great weakness is its narrator and central figure, the black Hotchkiss graduate and Stephanopoulos (and Klein) stand-in Henry Burton. He is that obligatory device, the transparent, all-seeing narrator, and – well beyond being an assimilated person of color – is so insistently colorless that we quickly cease to care about him except as a pair of eyes.
The first major contribution Nichols and May made to the film adaptation of Primary Colors was to give body and soul to Henry Burton, to make his Candide figure at once our surrogate and a suffering character in his own right. Nichols has done this by casting someone unknown to American audiences, Adrian Lester, a 27-year-old British stage actor with a sweet, open face and arrestingly expressive dark eyes.
From the moment Lester’s Henry first appears onscreen, watching in astonishment as John Travolta’s Jack Stanton presses the flesh at a Harlem rally, we’re with him – and we’re with Stanton because Henry is so bowled over by him. As magnetic as Travolta is – and God knows he is magnetic – it is Henry’s imprimatur of shock and awe at Stanton’s messy amalgam of nobility and primitive appetite that gives Primary Colors its real gravity.
“It seemed to me important for the audience to become Henry as much as possible,” Nichols says. “I wanted somebody who was an open book, and I loved Adrian’s openness, his innocence, his lack of any anger – it’s not so easy to find in a young actor.”
The fictional Henry is the son and grandson of Great Men who are something like Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. “Henry has an awful lot of baggage,” Adrian Lester says. “His father and grandfather made a difference politically and socially. And Henry wants to be a part of history, too, but doesn’t know whether the kinds of dreams and hopes and responsibilities his father and grandfather fought for will be around for him. Then he sees this governor and thinks this guy could really change the face of America.
“One of Mike’s concerns throughout,” Lester says, “was that there should be no point where you think Henry’s sold out. You should always be wondering if he’s sold out or not.”
A scene in Klein’s book where Susan Stanton comes to Henry devastated by her husband’s latest infidelity, then winds up sleeping with the campaign manager, was shot but later cut from the movie. A “Page Six” item in the New York Post claimed that pressure from “Universal biggies” was responsible for the cut, a charge Nichols reacts to sharply.
“Oh, it’s all so pathetic, this fiction,” he says. “I have final cut. They can’t insist on anything. I think it’s about fifteen seconds that’s gone. And it was a little more explicit than it should be under the circumstance – it was very disturbing, because you expected Susan and Henry to remain the good guys. So now it’s up for grabs, if you want to think it happened. But we’re not saying it happened.”
According to Adrian Lester, vox populi made the decision. “During the test previews, people were going, ‘Oh, no, Henry, don’t,’” he says. “He’d crossed the line.”
Primary Colors is constantly flirting with one line or another, particularly the boundary between fact and fiction. “I knew there were risks in making the movie,” Emma Thompson says. “The connections to D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s documentary about the ‘92 primary The War Room are obvious. The movie did that very risky thing of taking something against the sort of trash barrier – you hope it’s going to lift off above it because it presents a moral picture that’s genuine, a genuine self-examination.”
What kind of man survives the gauntlet of a presidential campaign? Primary Colors, the novel, asked the question, at length and poignantly, about its nakedly Clintonesque candidate Jack Stanton, and now Primary Colors, the movie, is asking it again, even more poignantly, at a time when the country can talk about little else. At such a time – good God! – of endlessly interweaving rumors and facts and news and parody, isn’t a movie that gives us more of the same, in a past-tense factoidal fable of the ‘92 presidential primaries … a bit much?
It isn’t. While the tickle of “Anonymous” was in its winking signal that the book’s journalistically unprintable gossip was, deep down, really journalism, we’ve gone a long way down that road in the two years since: Winking signals are scarcely needed anymore. And whatever the tabloids say, Primary Colors the movie is neither political fellatio nor artistic failure. It has not been, nor will it be, outstripped by the news.
Yes, it’s a treasure house of à clef nudges: Travolta and Emma Thompson as southern governor Jack Stanton and wife Susan (the Clintons); Adrian Lester as campaign manager Henry Burton (think Stephanopoulos); Thornton as the Carville-esque strategist Jemmons; Maura Tierney as coordinator Daisy Green (Mandy Grunwald); Kathy Bates as dirt-deflector Libby Holden (Betsey Wright); Larry Hagman as a decent former Florida governor with a besmirched background (take your pick); Gia Carides as whistle-blowing floozy Cashmere McLeod (Gennifer Flowers).
But the chief power of Primary Colors derives from the metaphorical light it sheds on the Clintons’ true-life characters and relationship, and on what has come to be regarded with a derisive snort as the American Political Process. Beyond the salt-peanuts fun of fantasy-meets-reality (and beyond a picture like Wag the Dog, which is pure salt peanuts), Primary Colors is – from its first flag-waving moments just before the New Hampshire primary to its final scene at Jack Stanton’s inaugural ball, in its perfect pacing and sublime ensemble acting – an artistically independent work.
Much overlooked in the brouhaha over the authorship of Primary Colors was the fact that it was no potboiler but a real novel, which Klein (in intricate collaboration with Random House’s Dan Menaker) brought off with brio. Yet the book’s great weakness is its narrator and central figure, the black Hotchkiss graduate and Stephanopoulos (and Klein) stand-in Henry Burton. He is that obligatory device, the transparent, all-seeing narrator, and – well beyond being an assimilated person of color – is so insistently colorless that we quickly cease to care about him except as a pair of eyes.
The first major contribution Nichols and May made to the film adaptation of Primary Colors was to give body and soul to Henry Burton, to make his Candide figure at once our surrogate and a suffering character in his own right. Nichols has done this by casting someone unknown to American audiences, Adrian Lester, a 27-year-old British stage actor with a sweet, open face and arrestingly expressive dark eyes.
From the moment Lester’s Henry first appears onscreen, watching in astonishment as John Travolta’s Jack Stanton presses the flesh at a Harlem rally, we’re with him – and we’re with Stanton because Henry is so bowled over by him. As magnetic as Travolta is – and God knows he is magnetic – it is Henry’s imprimatur of shock and awe at Stanton’s messy amalgam of nobility and primitive appetite that gives Primary Colors its real gravity.
“It seemed to me important for the audience to become Henry as much as possible,” Nichols says. “I wanted somebody who was an open book, and I loved Adrian’s openness, his innocence, his lack of any anger – it’s not so easy to find in a young actor.”
The fictional Henry is the son and grandson of Great Men who are something like Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. “Henry has an awful lot of baggage,” Adrian Lester says. “His father and grandfather made a difference politically and socially. And Henry wants to be a part of history, too, but doesn’t know whether the kinds of dreams and hopes and responsibilities his father and grandfather fought for will be around for him. Then he sees this governor and thinks this guy could really change the face of America.
“One of Mike’s concerns throughout,” Lester says, “was that there should be no point where you think Henry’s sold out. You should always be wondering if he’s sold out or not.”
A scene in Klein’s book where Susan Stanton comes to Henry devastated by her husband’s latest infidelity, then winds up sleeping with the campaign manager, was shot but later cut from the movie. A “Page Six” item in the New York Post claimed that pressure from “Universal biggies” was responsible for the cut, a charge Nichols reacts to sharply.
“Oh, it’s all so pathetic, this fiction,” he says. “I have final cut. They can’t insist on anything. I think it’s about fifteen seconds that’s gone. And it was a little more explicit than it should be under the circumstance – it was very disturbing, because you expected Susan and Henry to remain the good guys. So now it’s up for grabs, if you want to think it happened. But we’re not saying it happened.”
According to Adrian Lester, vox populi made the decision. “During the test previews, people were going, ‘Oh, no, Henry, don’t,’” he says. “He’d crossed the line.”
Primary Colors is constantly flirting with one line or another, particularly the boundary between fact and fiction. “I knew there were risks in making the movie,” Emma Thompson says. “The connections to D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s documentary about the ‘92 primary The War Room are obvious. The movie did that very risky thing of taking something against the sort of trash barrier – you hope it’s going to lift off above it because it presents a moral picture that’s genuine, a genuine self-examination.”
Thompson says she deliberately set out not to impersonate Hillary Clinton. “I sort of cast her a few glances,” she says. “I got out a few bios and thought, She’s splendid, but wanted to go my own way. It made me much freer.” Her chief research, Thompson says, was “informing myself as much as I could about the American political process and that profoundly bizarre voyage to the White House.”
John Travolta is another story. Or, as Larry Hagman puts it: “Boy oh boy, if he ain’t playin’ Clinton, it’s mighty close to him.” Travolta gained twenty pounds for the role; he streaked his hair white. His voice, though, is the biggest tip-off: The hoarse dying fall, warm and smooth as grits and gravy, is Big Bubba to a T. “I can’t really pretend he wasn’t a model for it,” Travolta says. The actor even made the ultimate sacrifice: In one scene in the movie, he manages to bring off the astonishing feat – astonishing for John Travolta, anyway – of dancing like a chunky white boy.
Thompson, Travolta, and Nichols briefly pondered the verisimilitude asymmetry between Jack and Susan Stanton, then decided simply to go with it. The result is – as with Henry Burton – an improvement over the novel that is both considered and serendipitous. For while Klein’s Stantons are sharp-edged (and lightly fictionalized) renderings of real people, the movie’s First Couple achieve an almost surreal rightness, a facty fictionality that seems to take us closer to the heart of Hillary-and-Bill (Billary?) than any true-life scrutiny ever could.
In the novel, when Henry meets Susan Stanton for the first time, on a landing field in Manchester, New Hampshire, she tells him his grandfather was a great man – then turns to her perpetually late husband and says, “Jack Stanton could also be a great man if he weren’t such a faithless, thoughtless, disorganized, undisciplined shit.” It’s a terrific scene, but it’s one that achieves transcendence in the movie, as Travolta takes his lumps from the strong-willed, clear-thinking Thompson, then snuggles up behind her as she’s stalking away, cupping her breasts and cooing a romantic country song into her ear. What happens in the movie that doesn’t happen in the book is small but huge: a quick, helpless smile by Thompson that tells the whole story of how besotted she is with this magnetic, irresponsible man.
“To me, the miracle of Emma’s performance, even when she’s calling him an asshole and slapping him, is that it is always clear that he owns her,” Nichols says. “Every second. She’s his. And she’s like a part of him yelling at another part of him.”
In the February 9 New Yorker, Joe Klein pondered the Clintons’ marriage in terms that seemed – for the author of Primary Colors, at any rate – oddly diffident. Klein called it “a stupefyingly weird relationship” and said, “There are public aspects of it that mystify.” A movie can, of course, be mysterious, but it may not mystify. The pictures must tell the story, and that one tiny moment between Thompson and Travolta, along with many others, says more than the book’s author ever could. “It’s Mike’s movie. I bequeath him the characters,” Klein told me recently.
Nichols has been waiting for them a long time. From his improvisational comedy to his theater directing and producing (Barefoot in the Park, Annie) to his 30-year string of movies both successful (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, Working Girl, Postcards from the Edge, and The Birdcage) and not (Catch-22, Wolf, Regarding Henry), there is no more American an artist than Mike Nichols; at the same time, something in him is perpetually Michael Igor Peschkowsky, the 7-year-old refugee from Weimar Berlin who arrived in New York Harbor in 1939.
“I remember with my kid brother, who was 4, the excitement of Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola, food that made noise. And did things,” he says, laughing. “I remember all those excitements. And I remember amazement at freedom. Coming off the Bremen, I saw a sign on the dock – delicatessen. It had some Hebrew letters, and I said, ‘Is that allowed?’ So I had gotten it a little bit. I understood.”
Yet it was an understanding that, in his rush to become a thoroughly American success, Nichols suppressed until recently. “The Doctorows had dinner, and Lukas Foss’s wife, Cornelia, and I were next to each other, and it turned out we’d come over from Europe as children within a few weeks of each other,” he says. It had also been, it turned out, a few weeks before the arrival – and the turning-away by U.S. authorities – of the refugee ship St. Louis, “and all that that implied: they all went back and went into the camps. And she told me that she had gone to her shrink not so long ago and said that she felt so terribly guilty. And he said, ‘Ah, yes – we’ve been looking for you for a long time.’ And she said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ve all been looking for the person who caused the deaths of the 6 million.’ And I burst into tears at dinner.
“And to my own astonishment, in the days and weeks and months following this experience, I began to realize to what extent I have never looked at my feelings about this. And then in the last couple of years I’ve begun to, to some extent, explore my background. I always knew my grandfather was a writer of some importance in Germany and my grandmother, his wife, was a poet, and she had written the libretto for Salome with Strauss. And my grandfather had been part of the two-week provisional Weimar government, and been killed immediately after that by the gun butts of the police in the courtyard of the police station. My mother found this out hearing it on the streetcar when she was, I think, 11 or 12.
“I became slightly obsessed with those who didn’t make it, and the few who did,” Nichols says. “And weirdly, for the first time in my life, I began to think about it, which in turn led me to thinking about what is now my country. And realized how much I love it. And because I was, in a sort of half-assed, unthinking way, with Elaine, a social critic …”
His voice trails off for a moment as he tries to weigh a distant past – the Eisenhower-Kennedy years of Nichols and May’s heyday, that black-and-white time of American confidence and hypocrisy and anxiety that was the perfect petri dish for the team’s edgy improvised dialogues – against the vastly different present on which he and Elaine May have chosen to comment again.
“What interested us was behavior,” he says. “It was the only thing that ever interested us. And it’s still the only thing that interests us. Our own, primarily, but everybody always thought we meant them. It was really ourselves we were making fun of. Remembering, you know, in the backseat of the car and so forth. And at the same time, we were making fun of the prom queen and the basketball player that we could never be. It was too easy – too much fun to go after everybody.
“But what I didn’t realize when we were doing all that stuff – well, that’s not quite right. I realized it in Elaine but not in me. I watched Elaine, and I thought, She’s doing this remarkable thing. She’s looking at these people from the outside and the inside at the same time. It was always real. There was always great forgiveness and sympathy with these people while she was making fun of them. That was her great gift. But now I think that although she was better at the acting of it than I was, when I began to direct I was more interested in understanding and sympathizing with characters than exposing them.”
It’s still true. Presented with every opportunity in the world, Primary Colors never stoops for a minute to cheap cynicism or facile satire, yet still manages to be deeply funny. It relentlessly maintains its dignity, and the dignity of all involved, without ever losing sight of their raunchy humanity. (And culpability.) It looks at its characters as God, or a Russian playwright, might.
“For me,” Nichols says, “the joys of this movie are not so different from working on, or seeing or reading, Chekhov. The intricacy of a group – A wants B, who wants C, who wants D, who wants E, who wants F, who is having an affair with A. And Chekhov’s gag, the thing from which he invented the modern theater, was that he would let us know that, and then set them all loose and let us watch it. And that aspect of this picture makes me very happy because it’s what Elaine and I love. It’s the greatest joy when you can hear audible pleasure from the audience because suddenly the phone rings and Henry is in bed with Daisy, and on the other end is Libby, who’s with Jennifer, and what she’s saying is, ‘Cashmere has tapes.’ And he has to get out of bed with Daisy and go knock on the Stantons’ door and tell them that Cashmere has tapes, and Susan slaps the governor. That’s what I love. That’s like life. That’s the story I wanted to tell – that everybody’s in bed with somebody.
“If we’re asking for forgiveness, it’s nice to remember that everybody’s in bed with someone.”
On this, Nichols has longitudinal perspective. He and Elaine May performed at President Kennedy’s famous/infamous 45th-birthday party: “I was standing right behind Marilyn when she sang ‘Happy Birthday,’” he recalls. “She had been sewed into her dress. And as she stepped up on this thing, it split. I could see her ass. In this sort of flesh-colored-to-begin-with dress. So I have a very clear memory of that.” He laughs. “There was a party after that show, and we made some Bobby jokes, and Bobby Kennedy was very pissed. He said, ‘I’m going to look into your tax returns.’ And then we were on the dance floor, and he and Marilyn danced past us, having met that night. And I actually heard her say – it’s so bizarre – I heard her say, ‘I like you, Bobby.’ And he said, ‘I like you, too, Marilyn.’ Who would write this dialogue for the night they met? And I heard it! I was Zelig! You don’t know that history is being made when it’s being made.”
“Were you electrified by Jack Kennedy?” I ask him. “Did you have any skeptical feelings?”
“No,” he says. “I was utterly electrified. From the first, I thought that they were this bizarre combination of actually-like-us and also magical. Startling … that instead of it being people like Harry Truman, the president and the First Lady were people like us. And of course, when you met them, it was even more startling, because they were really like us. Really sharp. Really funny.
“I didn’t know President Kennedy really, but I got to be friends with Mrs. Kennedy after he died,” Nichols says. “And I always thought – no, I didn’t think, I knew – that her way of meeting life was developed from studying Malraux, her hero. Malraux devised for De Gaulle a very simple strategy – silence is power. And I think that she adapted that idea for herself, and made it work as well as anybody in this century. And it was a silence that was continued. It was never really broken.
“I think that within that silence were many things that we’ll never know that their friends are always guessing about. But I think that’s the point. And in a strange way, it’s the point about the Stantons. I don’t know anything about the Clintons. What I know, I know about the Stantons, who are imaginary people. But it is that there are some things no one will ever know. That’s the point. That’s what a marriage is. No one will ever know what they really say to each other about these things, and what they feel about these things. And that’s the power of marriage. And it’s the power of leaders.
“You know, that glass bell that E. M. Forster writes about that descends onto people when they marry,” says Nichols, who has been married to Sawyer, his fourth wife, since 1988. “That glass bell is not only what allows civilization to carry on but what allows people to love each other for 20, 30, 40 years. Nobody knows what she knew, what he knew. Who he screwed. Whether he did it. Whether she did it. Who had whom.”
A few days after the break of Lewinskygate, Nichols and I have lunch in a restaurant off Park Avenue, and I ask the inevitable question: Will all this be good for business? Bad for business? Nichols laughs. “It’s the only time in my life I cannot imagine what will happen,” he says. “I mean, since the last preview, will the laughs be bigger? Will the laughs be less? Of course, there’s been endless talk about it. It’s part of this weird thing that’s happened. Just as rumors become headlines, nobody has to substantiate anything anymore. Also, you don’t wait for anything anymore. Everybody has to speculate on business. How can anybody possibly have any idea? I said to the guys at the studio, it could fall into the category of something getting too much publicity. If that really is a big worry. I haven’t seen a lot of it so far – that something did badly because it got too much publicity.”
But will Primary Colors be seen, as the tabloids have endlessly charged, as Nichols’s apologia for his pal Bill? By some, anything short of a sneering, seething, climactic John Huston-in-Chinatown turn by Travolta will doubtless be seen as a big wet kiss to Clinton. And whatever Mike Nichols’s deep-down feelings of inadequacy, he’s no Zelig: He’s been a serious American eminento for 40 years, one with, no doubt, a certain grain of fellow feeling for the likes of JFK and WJC; and it’s hard to show the corridors of power clearly from the inside.
But he’s also far too subtle a mind to fail that challenge. (And also far too sharp a mind not to realize that Clinton’s remark about Hammett and Faulkner was pure surface – and pure seduction! – based more on the physical resemblance between the authors than on any stylistic similarity.)
If the mark of a first-rate intellect is indeed the ability to hold two opposed ideas at once, Primary Colors is the triumph of Mike Nichols’s intellect. “There’s this line in The Philadelphia Story – ‘The time to make up your mind about people is never,’” he says. “It’s a line that I’ve always loved. I don’t want to see a thesis on a character. I don’t want to see an opinion. I want to see the mystery of a person. Some days you might think this; some days you might think that. But there are no conclusions.
“And yet, I don’t want to preclude observation. The observation that comes from a certain mistrust, even from a certain anger or malice in observing people. It took me a long time to accept my own malice. I had to realize how much pleasure, say, Gore Vidal’s or Martin Amis’s malice gave me. You say, ‘Oh, look, it’s liberating. It’s pleasing. There’s nothing wrong with it. As long as it’s combined with some respect and love for people at the same time.’”
For anyone who thinks Nichols has presented a puff piece on Clinton, the critical moment in Primary Colors is when Kathy Bates, as a morality litmus test for her old heroes the Stantons, presents them, in the kitchen of the governor’s mansion, with a dossier of dirt about Jack Stanton’s opponent Freddy Picker (Hagman). Will they hesitate to use it? There is not a flicker of hesitation, and Bates is crushed. The scene is powerfully accusatory – and fateful – in the novel, and its punch is not pulled in the movie.
“To me,” Nichols says, “the killer moment is when Emma says in the kitchen, ‘We didn’t know how the world worked. Now we know.’ Because I think it’s true for all of us. I think most people feel that way: ‘I’m sorry to have learned what it’s really like.’”