By Helen Epstein

This extraordinary cultural figure has yet to receive the biography she deserves.

Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen. St. Martin’s Press, 400 pp.
Elaine May by Elizabeth Alsop. Contemporary Film Directors, University of Illinois Press, 170 pp.

If you are a film or theater buff of a certain age, you are more than likely to have fallen under the spell of improv pioneer, actor, director, playwright, screenwriter, and often uncredited script doctor Elaine May. Her career spans some 70 years, but until now, no author had been intrepid enough to write her biography. Brilliant, feral, a difficult girl who grew up to be a difficult woman; sexy, seductive, hostile, and stubbornly private. Like the pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante, May is famous for avoiding publicity and inventing facts about her life.

After watching her perform four times, critic Edmund Wilson wrote in his diary, “I was sorry not to be young enough to fall in love with her and ruin my life.” Actor Richard Burton wrote in his diary, “one of the most intelligent, beautiful and witty women I had ever met. I hoped I would never see her again.” Her 1958 bio on the first Mike Nichols and Elaine May comedy LP cover read, “Miss May does not exist.” In 1975, preceding an interview at The New School, May asked her interlocutor, “Why should I reveal myself to you? After all, we’ve only known each other about an hour.” In 2018, when she starred in The Waverly Gallery at age 86, her Playbill bio, a paragraph long, read, “She has done more but this is enough.”

May would have been a challenging subject even for veteran journalist Gay Talese, who wrote his justly famous “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” profile without the cooperation of his subject. When Sinatra refused to be interviewed, Talese, a longtime reporter, interviewed everyone around Sinatra and kept himself out of the story. Unfortunately, biographer Carrie Courogen does neither, and film scholar Elizabeth Alsop focuses narrowly on an analysis of May’s four feature films.

Reading these two books is both fascinating and frustrating for anyone eager to learn about May’s long and extraordinary life. She was born in Philadelphia in 1932 to Ida Azarow and Jack Berlin — both Jews of Eastern European descent. Early on, she performed onstage with her father in a Yiddish theater road company. After he died in Chicago in 1942, Ida and Elaine moved to Los Angeles. Elaine quit school at 14, married schoolmate Marvin May at 16, and gave birth to daughter Jeannie at 17. Six months later, they divorced.

In 1952, Elaine May left their toddler with her mother and hitchhiked to the University of Chicago, where she audited classes, hung out with the Compass Players (forerunners of The Second City), and started performing with fellow actor Mike Nichols. Ignoring the traditional comedic model of clueless woman and all-knowing man (Gracie Allen-George Burns, Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz), they developed egalitarian, sardonic, and improvisatory dialogues about what the New Yorker later called “the appalling (to them, at least) relationships that habitually exist between… males and females.”

Those skits included a teenage boy and girl smoking while necking; a guilt-tripping mother telephoning her son; a doctor treating a patient. In 1958 they brought their act to New York clubs, then to national TV, then to Broadway. In 1961, at the top of their form and flush with cash and critical acclaim, Elaine called it quits.

Mike Nichols went on to become an artistically and commercially successful director. May went into psychoanalysis, wrote plays, became a ghostwriter and wife. First (for a matter of months), she was married to lyricist Sheldon Harnick. In 1963, she married her shrink David Rubinfine, a theater-loving member of the orthodox New York Psychoanalytic Institute whose wife subsequently killed herself and left the couple with their three daughters and May’s then teenage daughter Jeannie to raise. For the next few years May ran a household for six on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She occasionally appeared in comedy films such as Luv and Enter Laughing, while she wrote and rewrote film and theater scripts.

She developed such a stellar rep as a screenplay doctor that both close colleagues and strangers sought her out. Producer Otto Preminger, dissatisfied with the adaptations of Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends (1971) that screenwriters such as Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Didion, and John Gregory Dunne had drafted, paid May $175,000 to do a rewrite, which May only agreed to do under a pseudonym. She was then preparing her first feature film, A New Leaf, which she had been working on for years, and in which she would star and direct. It opened in 1971.

A New Leaf was followed a year later by The Heartbreak Kid, then by Mikey and Nicky in 1976. By the time her fourth and final film, Ishtar, came out in 1987, the press had made a huge story of her insistence on wasting time and film on endless improvisations and her lack of technical background, which resulted in huge cost overruns. This criticism, which both authors feel was exacerbated by sexism, damaged her credibility in Hollywood. More people knew more about Ishtar as a financial disaster than about its plot or stars Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and Isabelle Adjani. It effectively brought her career in film to an end.

But May remained in high demand as a script doctor, not only by producers but by colleagues such as playwright Neil Simon, Nichols, Hoffman, and Beatty. Often choosing to go uncredited, she worked on the screenplays of Heaven Can Wait, California Suite, Reds, and Tootsie, taking a break in 1980 to play Martha opposite Mike Nichols in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? at Long Wharf in New Haven.

For two decades, she continued a lucrative script doctoring career. See: Heartburn (1986), Working Girl (1988), The Birdcage (1995), and Primary Colors (1998). Her second husband died in 1982. In 1999, she began a 20-year relationship with veteran film director and choreographer Stanley Donen (Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Two for the Road) which lasted until his death in 2019. May’s last work as an actor was a production of The Waverly Gallery, for which she won a Tony Award. Her last work as a director was the PBS American Masters documentary about Mike Nichols in 2016.

So what do these two books make of all this?

The author of Miss May Does Not Exist chose a chronological structure, did extensive library research, and dutifully footnoted every source. But she was able to obtain few live interviews, couldn’t synthesize her materials, and repeatedly inserted herself into the story, starting with her prologue:

It’s a crisp Tuesday evening in September, and as I sit on a bench on Central Park West across the street from Elaine May’s apartment, the thought occurs to me that I have absolutely lost my mind. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt close to insanity; the feeling has hit me several times over the past three years that I’ve spent working on this biography. But as I try to subtly adjust the too-tight long blond wig on my head — you see, I’m just as scared of being recognized by Elaine as she maybe is of me — that looks every bit of the $25 it cost….etc.

This sets the tone for the next 300 pages that lard Courogen’s speculations and digressions into research from other people’s interviews, articles, and books. For the 1950s, she was lucky to be able to mine Something Wonderful Right Away, playwright Jeffrey Sweet’s source book about the Chicago improv scene. For film and theater, she was lucky that cultural historian Mark Harris, author of the biography of Mike Nichols (Arts Fuse review) agreed to help her, since Nichols’s artistic life remained intertwined with May’s until he died. But the reader soon understands May’s refusal to cooperate with Courogen. While some books are hard to put down, hers is hard to keep reading. Her frequent asides confuse an already very complicated narrative while leaving basic questions unanswered.

How did being Jewish pervade May’s life and work? Who constituted May’s family of origin and what was their relationship like? Given the large role mothers play in May’s work, Courogen gives little space to Ida, not even her maiden name (I found it in her father’s obit). How long did Ida parent Jeannie Berlin, enabling May to study, act, and write in Chicago? Did Courogen ever attempt to interview Jeannie Berlin and May’s three step-daughters?

I also wanted to read about Elaine’s years in psychoanalysis, how she used the therapy in her writing and the boundary violation between May and her analyst that caused such a scandal in 1963 that he was thrown out of his psychoanalytic institute. There’s a whole chapter about it in Farber and Green’s Hollywood on the Couch.

“Did Elaine and David Rubinfine start their romantic affair while she was still his patient? We’ll probably never know,” Courogen writes blithely. “In a normal situation David would have been a catch: a blue-eyed soft-spoken man who wasn’t in show business himself — no competition there — but interested enough in it to understand and care about her career. And his job was great, too, respectable and prestigious…. But it’s not like they were a dry and stuffy intellectual Upper West Side couple.”

This is superficial and inaccurate writing. Who would describe Upper West Side couples of the 1960s as “dry and stuffy,” or believe L.A. teenagers “flip for the best rumble seat” as though there were several; or “Berkshire” used as short for the Berkshire Theatre Festival. These are small gaffes that should have been flagged by an editor, along with the windy speculative passages that complicate Courogen’s needlessly confusing narrative.

For a minute there, it didn’t look like Elaine’s career was going to survive the 1960s. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe you could call it fate, could blame it on the universe. Maybe you could argue…. But maybe it was the sexism that she had evaded for so long creeping in…

Courogen’s website describes her as “a New York-based writer, editor, strategist, and director with over a decade of editorial experience in print, digital, and video media.” Miss May Does Not Exist is her first book. She is overmatched by her subject and was not well-served by her editor.

Elizabeth Alsop’s Elaine May is another kind of project altogether: a sober volume of film scholarship that analyzes May’s work and puts it into the cultural context of its time. Part of a series titled Contemporary Film Directors from the University of Illinois Press, it follows a formula: critical commentary, an interview with the director, and a filmography. Because Alsop had no better luck landing an interview with May than Courogen, she includes one from 2010 by Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive.

Alsop limits her personal info to a paragraph in her acknowledgments. Her study began as a Covid project, she writes.

During the initial lockdown I decided to watch all of Elaine May’s films in chronological order. When I got to Ishtar, I was flabbergasted: This was the movie everyone had maligned? The first sequence alone was easily one of the funniest things I had ever seen. I feel lucky that I’ve had the chance to write about films I love this much and to take on a project that brought me a lot of joy during some difficult times.”

Alsop situates May in the history and contexts of improv, women as film directors, auteurism, feminist film criticism, the New Hollywood, and independent films. She points out that with her first film, “May became only the second woman since Ida Lupino to write, direct, and star in a feature-length film for a major studio.” She gives a close reading to May’s four features — what she calls the “deeply unromantic comedies” A New Leaf  andThe Heartbreak Kid,“the deconstructed gangster film”  Mikey and Nicky, and “the studio-engineered failure” Ishtar. She has a clear agenda: to rebut the narrative of disaster that has dogged May since that film and to reposition her as a major American film director in a group of all-male more-or-less contemporaries that include Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Peter Bogdanovich, and John Cassavetes. All disregarded cost overruns and all insisted on exercising total control over their films. Yet they kept on making movies while May could not.

In a series of short sections with provocative titles such as “Born in a Trunk: The Perils of Biography” and “Men Explain Things to May,” Alsop shows that, in addition to being “widely understood to be a genius,” she was uncompromising and unrealistic. She insisted that her actors adopt her time-consuming improvisational methods to develop their characters on-set; at the same time, she had almost no knowledge of the technical side of filmmaking.

Unlike Courogen, Alsop addresses the pervasive issue of Jewishness in May’s work: Jewish humor, Jewish characters, Yiddishisms, Jewish stereotypes, antisemitism. For example, in her discussion of The Heartbreak Kid, in which Charles Grodin’s Lenny is at dinner with Cybill Shepherd’s WASPy Corcoran family, she writes that “the image of failed assimilation anticipates the more broadly comic scene of Jewish alienation in Annie Hall in which Alvy Singer sits down to a holiday dinner, only to flash to an image of himself dressed in Orthodox garb at this table of unsmiling WASPs.”

In addition to the Jewish themes in May’s work, Alsop writes that her ideas about the human condition were difficult for mainstream America:

On the whole, her work for stage and screen is strikingly unified in its thematic focus on men (and occasionally women) struggling against the tide of their own lives and the extravagant difficulty such efforts entail. …Written between 1962 and 2011, May’s twelve plays center around characters operating under the particularly American delusion that the straitjackets of circumstance or social convention might, through sheer force of will, be escaped.

Alsop’s defense of May’s last film, in a chapter titled “Ishtar: Trolling Hollywood,” does not lend itself to easy condensation. Suffice it to say that having read the back story, I will now view the film, because like millions of moviegoers, I believed the terrible press it received and never saw it.

Turing the last page of Alsop’s slim volume made me wish that she would extend her study to the rest of May’s work, and persuade May and those close to her to be interviewed. Then this extraordinary cultural figure might have the biography she deserves.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp: An American Life and 10 other books of nonfiction. She has written for the Arts Fuse since 2010.