Elaine May’s Worst-Kept Secret
BY
Keva York
On Elaine May’s pseudonymously penned second screenplay, Such Good Friends (1971).
Such Good Friends and A New Leaf play at Metrograph in January as part of Also Starring… James Coco.
After a protracted edit, Elaine May’s A New Leaf was released in 1971—but not in the form that its writer, director, and star intended. Paramount had wrested the film from her, in violation of the terms of their carefully drawn contract, and shorn her three-hour cut of a full 80 minutes. An incensed May had in turn taken the studio to court, in a bid—an unsuccessful one—to have her name removed from the project (there could be no removing her face).
And so the tone was set for a directorial career circumscribed by conflict with studio higher-ups, who were too impatient, penurious, and in all likelihood sexist to afford her the freedom she’d been accustomed to working alongside Mike Nichols as one half of America’s most beloved comedy duo. May’s third film, Mikey and Nicky (1976), was also prised from her hands by Paramount, then dumped via a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run; the tortured production of her fourth and, to date, final feature, the big budget blow-out Ishtar (1987), remains enshrined in cultural memory as a high watermark Hollywood nightmare. (Let the record show that her second film, 1972’s The Heartbreak Kid, was—remarkably, given everything else—untroubled.)
Betrayal, on-screen as well as off, courses through May’s slim, storied filmography—inaugurated with A New Leaf, the screwball story of a categorically self-interested spendthrift who, on discovering his fortune expired, plots to marry some rich, credulous woman with the express purpose of then murdering her. Walter Matthau’s Henry Graham finds a perfect victim in May’s Henrietta Lowell, a klutzy botanist whose deep knowledge of ferns is offset by her ignorance of almost everything else.
A New Leaf (1971)
Such a misallied union is also the subject of May’s second screenplay—too often passed over in discussions of her work—Such Good Friends (1971). The venerable comedienne had been hired by Otto Preminger, then in the garish twilight of his career, to adapt the novel of the same name by Lois Gould, a 1970 New York Times best-seller about a set of moneyed New Yorkers almost as blinkered as those of A New Leaf. (When Preminger first approached her, early in 1970, May was still embroiled in the A New Leaf edit; she would become available in the time it took for him to burn through a series of alternatives, amongst them Joan Micklin Silver, and husband-and-wife duo Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.) Fresh from her failed lawsuit against Paramount, and determined to henceforth keep her name off anything she didn’t have full control over, May chose to sign her work on the film pseudonymously—as “Esther Dale,” a name she impishly borrowed from a mid-century bit player of matrons and maids.
Gould’s book, in fact a fictionalized memoir, reworked a perversely tragic chapter of the author’s life. In the spring of 1966, her then-husband Philip Benjamin, a novelist and reporter for the Times, had gone into hospital for a minor operation; a reaction to the anesthesia used meant that he never re-emerged. Gould had found herself suddenly, at age 35, a widow and single mother to their two boys. Benjamin’s death, however, was just the first of a cosmic double whammy: then came the discovery amongst the deceased’s effects of a little black book that revealed the extent to which she, rather like Henrietta, had been in the dark about the true nature of her marriage. Unfolding in first-person from the perspective of Gould’s avatar, Julie Messinger, Such Good Friends sported a dust jacket that teased it as “the most intimate novel a woman ever wrote.”
May would depart from the book’s clipped tone, however, plopping gobbets of broad comedy into Gould’s account of a woman pushed to an edge she hadn’t known was there. The film opens with Julie (played by Dyan Cannon) bounding out to an industry do in honor of her big-time art director husband, Richard (Laurence Luckinbill), on the eve of his operation. Boldly going bra-less in a skimpy crocheted top, she gets an awooga-style reaction from her Central Park West doorman; once at the party, she boogies with a nominally august author played by Burgess Meredith and hallucinates him nude, save for his shoes, spats, and a hardback tome goofily dangling over his nether parts.
Such Good Friends (1971)
Elements of the film play as classic May. Richard’s plight—he goes into hospital to have a mole removed and suffers an escalating series of complications—could well be an expanded sketch from the final comedy album May made with Nichols, 1962’s Nichols and May Examine Doctors, with its gallery of quirky medical un-professionals. (The specialists of Such Good Friends rattle off such chilling reassurances as, “If you’re sick enough to get into intensive care, you have a chance of surviving in a hospital.”) Then there’s Timmy Spector, the doctor in charge of Richard’s case as well as a close friend of the couple’s: as Gould wrote him, he was “one part sex, two parts gin, a dash of bitters”; for the film, he’s remodeled as Bronx-born tubster James Coco, and must struggle, in one comically distressing long take, to surreptitiously remove his lace-up girdle in anticipation of a blowjob—the grubby complement of A New Leaf’s Grecian nightgown set-piece.
Anyone who’s seen A New Leaf knows that May excels at such silliness; anyone who’s seen the swingin’ sixties folly that was Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) knows that he does not. Unlike either of those films, however, Such Good Friends is tinged with genuine abjection—and that contaminates the laffs, but in a way that actually works in the film’s favor, at least if you like your laffs on the queasy side. (Setting a lame duck act of revenge sex to trilling kazoo music: awful—but maybe perfect?) Sex-starved, dissociative Julie sees her surroundings as grotesque, but the film more or less takes her, and her rude awakening, seriously.
Such Good Friends (1971)
The same could not be said of Preminger and Cannon, however. Tensions between the notoriously strong-armed director and his star erupted on the first day of the shoot, auguring a production that Preminger’s son Erik, one of the film’s producers, described as “very, very, very unpleasant.” “He’s a horrible man,” avowed Cannon, still smarting in an interview a couple of years after the film’s release.
Cannon opined that Preminger had ruined “a brilliant script”—begging the question, what if May had been in the director’s chair? Her methods were the inverse of Preminger’s—she consistently privileged improvisation and experimentation over pesky matters like money and shooting schedules, while he was a man of ruthless efficiency; as per Andrew Sarris, “a director with the personality of a producer.” What May did have in common with the elder Austrian American, however, was a certain detachment: she was not a cruel caricaturist, but neither did she spare any character their full measure of shallowness, ineptitude, or stupidity. It’s notable that, of the films she’s known to have made significant contributions to, Such Good Friends alone focuses on a heroine (unless you count Tootsie); perhaps centering men allowed May to more easily maintain that distance, and so her knowing, crystalline wit.
“Elaine is the exact opposite of everyone in Hollywood,” observed Charles Grodin, star of The Heartbreak Kid. “She’s always fighting to get as little credit as possible, to keep her name off movies, to not be invited to the parties.” By the time Preminger came a-calling, May already had a history of evading publicity—which does not make her a recluse, though she’s often tagged with that label (if anything, it makes her a very sensible person). Even as far back as Nichols and May’s first comedy album, Improvisations to Music, released in 1958, her bio read simply, “Miss May does not exist.”
She was reportedly nonplussed by the leaking of her involvement in Such Good Friends. Her insistence on obscuring her own contribution, here as with the many other films she’s since helped to write or punch-up, is tantamount to a promise—contra Gould—of an absence of intimacy. May knows, and Julie learns: that’s really the only kind of promise you can count on.
Keva York is a New York-born, Melbourne-based writer and critic.
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
