When Mike Nichols had his dazzling comedy act with Elaine May, one of their sketches began with a Jewish mother calling her son and saying, “Hello, this is your mother, do you remember me?” When Mike Nichols had his dazzling
When Mike Nichols had his dazzling comedy act with Elaine May, one of their sketches began with a Jewish mother calling her son and saying, “Hello, this is your mother, do you remember me?”
Over deviled eggs and beer at Bar Centrale in New York’s theater district, Nichols recalled that the routine was born when he was a young comic and his mother phoned him with that question. Still, he says, “the mother’s guilt production” is not the paramount force in families.
Nichols, who directed the agonizing wrestling match between Biff and Willy Loman in the hit revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, believes that the father-son wrassle is the central American relationship: “When the mother says, ‘I’m suffering because you don’t love me enough,’ that’s entirely different from the father saying, ‘This is what you’re going to do for a living? You’re not going to go into the family rug cleaning business that I’ve spent my life building?’ Or, ‘I’m going to have to spend the money I’ve saved up for you to learn how to be a writer or scenic designer or whatever the hell you want to do?’
“The following or not following in the footsteps of the father is a tricky and anxiety-producing discussion between fathers and sons.”
Presidential politics thrum with Oedipal loop-de-loops. Many candidates — J.F.K., Al Gore, Mitt Romney — seem to be running to fulfill their fathers’ dreams more than their own. Others, like W. and John McCain, are shadowboxing with fathers who cast a long shadow. Still others, like Jon Huntsman, are treated to a campaign by wealthy dads. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich have lived in the shadow of their fathers’ absence.
“I know so many people — actors, directors, writers — who can’t get their father to even acknowledge their accomplishments,” Nichols said.
As Michael Gurian writes in “The Prince and the King,” “The father-son wound is not the only source of troubles in a man’s life, but it is one of the most profound.”
The hero’s journey to find his father shapes epics from Jesus to “The Odyssey” to “Star Wars” to the narrative of Barack Obama. “The finding of the father,” Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers, “has to do with finding your own character and destiny.”
In the Oedipal myth, the son goes out into the world to prove himself, then returns to unknowingly kill the father and marry the mother.
“You know what the Freudians say, that the first enemy is the father, if you are a man,” Campbell said. “If you are a boy, every enemy is potentially psychologically associated with the father image.”
Nichols’s father, Pavel Nicholaievitch Peschkowsky, was a Russian Jew who trained to be a doctor in Berlin. He came to New York to escape the Nazis in 1938, and then also got his family out. They were able to leave because of the two-year-long Stalin-Hitler pact; unlike German Jews, Russian Jews were allowed to leave the country.
When his parents fought, young Mike felt he had to side with his father “because otherwise who would I identify with? My father was the guy whose essence was forming who I was.”
Nichols was only 11 when his father died. “Before he established his practice, he was a union doctor, and part of his job was X-raying union members,” he said. “They didn’t know about shielding X-ray machines. And he died of leukemia at 44.”
But the director has kept an open channel with his father: “I’ve had conversations with him about what I accomplished and what I didn’t. I’ve had to be him and me, him proud of me. He was proud once when I won a horse show in boarding school. And he was proud when I was brave when I broke my arm. And man, I’ve hauled those out innumerable times.”
A psychiatrist once told him, even after he was a success, that he was holding himself back because he was frightened that he would harm his father: “I was told that my problems were partly not wanting to symbolically kill my already dead father or to surpass him.”
Death does not end the jockeying. “When I became a comic, I used to see Sol Hurok, the impresario who had been my father’s patient, in the Russian Tea Room,” Nichols recalled. “He always said the same thing: ‘You’re very funny but your father was funnier.’ So it was announced to me that I had already lost the competition with my father.”
Willy weeps when he learns that Biff’s nerdy cousin, Bernard, has grown up to be a lawyer arguing a case before the Supreme Court, while his golden boy has become a loser because Willy raised him to believe it was O.K. to cheat a little and lie a little and fantasize a lot.
“Willy is weeping at the diminishment of Biff,” Nichols said. “And then Biff frees himself by telling his father the truth: ‘I’m nothing. You’re nothing.’ ”
And then the father dies, just like in the myth.
Maureen Dowd is a syndicated columnist who writes for the New York Times News Service.
