Fresh Eggheads

The fastest-sharpening wits in television belong to dark, disheveled Elaine May and blond, carefully tailored Mike Nichols, both 26, whose dry dialogues are as lethal as cold gin on a hot day.

"It's not what they do," says Milton Berle, who caught their nightclub act "60 or more times" in Manhattan. "It's how they do it, and they always do it different." Last week, on Dinah Shore's Chevy Show, Elaine and Mike supplied a sample: a long-distance phone conversation between a self-pitying neurotic mother and her feverishly busy scientist son who is too busy trying to launch a balky U.S. satellite to call or write. (Mike: I feel awful. Elaine: Honey, if I could believe that I'd be the happiest mother in the world.)

The Nichols-May dialogue is steeped in hilarious vocal nuance. Both have fine ears for inflections of speech, an unerring instinct for the telling mannerisms, whether of a Chicago sharpie, a Virginia gentleman, or a Brooklyn butcher. Their most extraordinary act is to ask an audience for two lines of dialogue, then proceed to improvise a scene on the spot, using one line as the start and the other line as the end. Furthermore, they will produce the dialogue in any literary style the audience suggests--Proust or Erskine Caldwell, Li'l Abner or Samuel Beckett. (A Faulknerian bit by Elaine: "And there she was feeling her armpits--glad that they were there.")

Playing Hooky. Elaine, born in Philadelphia, is the daughter of Yiddish Actor Jack Berlin. She began by playing little boys in Yiddish plays, later quit high school in Los Angeles and studied acting with the late Maria Ouspenskaya. To eat, she picked up such odd jobs as private detective, spieler for a sidewalk photographer. Then she heard "you could go to the University of Chicago without going to high school--and you can."

In Chicago she didn't bother to enroll, and talked--mostly, it turned out, to Mike Nichols, another cellar-dwelling semi-student. The son of a Russian-Jewish doctor, Mike was born in Berlin, came to the U.S. as a refugee from the Nazis. In Manhattan Mike shunted in and out of progressive schools, worked as a shipping clerk, disk jockey, even a jingle judge. "It was easy--throw out the dirty ones, and the one that was left was the winner," remembers Mike. He took acting lessons from Broadway's Methodman Lee Strasberg, then in Chicago teamed with Elaine ("extremely rude, a very dark bohemian girl in a trench coat").

Mocking Greed. Slowly, they built up a reputation on the nightclub circuit. Then, four months ago Omnibus Producer Robert Saudek gave them a 15-minute TV go with spectacular results. Currently, they are at Chicago's Mister Kelly's at $2,500 a week.

TV moguls are racking their brains to find a format that will exploit their talents without risking the withering overexposure which television inflicts on the greatest comics. Their improvising would be hamstrung by TV's taboos. Of the twelve skits for which they have developed a general pattern (though the dialogue varies on whim), many have too keen a cutting edge for TV sponsors--such as the mocking they give to mortuary sales pitches ("Welcome to Lawndust's $65 funeral"), which Mike calls simply a sermon on greed. "All we try to do is catch the spine of the thing," says Mike. "It's true and that's why they laugh."

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