The Disappearance of Agnes Lowzier

The last time I saw Agnes Lowzier, it was a misty night in L.A. She had just bargained a dowdy shamus out of a couple of Cs in exchange for some information on the whereabouts of the blonde wife of a mob boss. After performing her part of the bloodless exchange and asking the detective to wish her luck, she simply drove away into the night in her gray Plymouth, never to be seen again. Until now.

“Wish me luck,” she said, before she put her pointed toes down on the gas pedal. “I got a raw deal.”

“Your kind always does,” said the detective.

The detective was Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Big Sleep. The movie has grown in stature over the years. It was initially faulted by critics for the untidiness of its labyrinthine plot, but now it is seen as a classic example of film noir, in which story takes a backseat to process, mood and atmosphere. Another way of describing the film, which is one of my favorites after all, is that it is a canvas for a collection of cold-blooded murders and beatings, some fascinating character encounters, and a constant volley of wisecracks.

And who was Agnes? Agnes Lowzier was a slender, pretty “brunette with green eyes, kind of slanted” as Marlowe describes her (Chandler had her down as Agnes Lowzelle, a blonde), who cracked wise in her every scene. The first time we see her she is pretending to be a sales clerk at Geiger’s Rare Books, a shop that Marlowe supposes is actually a front for a bookie’s joint. Marlowe comes in to check things out, and poses as a collector. After establishing that Agnes doesn’t know too much about rare editions and anyway doesn’t seem to have any in stock, thus confirming his suspicions about the place, Marlowe asks, still in character as a collector, “You do sell books, hmm?” Agnes replies, gesturing carelessly at a random row of books: “What do those look like, grapefruit?”

Marlowe returns to the bookshop and reveals himself as he sees that the back of the store is being emptied. Agnes tells him to come back “tomorrow” if he wants to see Geiger. “Early, then?,” Marlowe asks with a note of sarcasm, letting her know that he knows the place will be empty tomorrow. “Yes, early,” she snarls, disgustedly acknowledging Marlowe’s cleverness.

Critic David Thomson calls what transpires between Marlowe and Agnes as a kind of “nagging marriage” – providing the film with one of its funniest subtexts. Marlowe sees Agnes’ shoes behind a curtain leading to another room in the apartment of a grasping, small-time hood named Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt). “Why don’t you ask your friend with the pointed toes to come out of there – she must get awful tired of holding her breath.” He calls her “Sugar” over and over again, because he knows it annoys her.

By the time Marlowe has disrupted Brody’s attempt to blackmail the Sternwoods and has generally humiliated everyone involved, Agnes almost seems willing to trade sides, registering her impatience with Brody’s incompetence. “Hm!,” she grunts. “What’s the matter, Sugar?,” Marlowe asks. Agnes replies: “He gives me a pain in my –“ and she is interrupted by Brody. “Where does he give you a pain?” Marlowe asks. “Right in my –“ and again, Agnes is interrupted by Brody. “That’s what I always draw,” Agnes says, “Never once a man who’s smart all the way around the course. Never once.” Referring to an earlier moment when he wrestled a gun away from her, Marlowe asks Agnes, who is rubbing her wrist, “Did I hurt you much, Sugar?” “You and every other man I’ve ever met,” she says.

Brody is killed by Geiger’s bodyguard a few seconds later, and Marlowe is on to other things, but Agnes comes back into the story when one of Brody’s associates, a dour little man named Harry Jones (Elisha Cook, Jr.), comes to Marlowe with a proposition. “So Agnes is on the loose again,” Marlowe cracks. “She’s a nice girl,” Jones says, “we’re thinking of getting married.” “She’s too big for you,” Marlowe says, but then thinks better of the remark and apologizes. He’s still wary of the way she insinuates herself into the schemes of one small-time grafter after another, hoping to make a quick buck, and when Mr. Jones suggests he’d be willing to stand up to a police grilling for Agnes’ sake, the still skeptical Marlowe remarks that “Agnes must have something I didn’t notice.”

Witnessing Harry’s murder at the hands of a mob brute named Canino (Bob Steele) while protecting Agnes’ whereabouts is Marlowe’s last straw where Agnes is concerned. “Your little man died to keep you out of trouble,” he tells her over the phone. He squints contemptuously and says, “I got your money for you. Do you want it?” When Marlowe meets her near the corner of Rampart and Oakland to give her the two Cs, she asks him, “What happened to Harry?” “There’s no use going into that – you don’t really care anyway. Just put it down your little man deserved something better.” At the moment that Marlowe seems to hate her the most, Agnes has never looked lovelier.

There are a small bevy of both credited and uncredited actresses who make splendid little impressions in the movie, but Thomson and numerous others single out the work of Sonia Darrin as Agnes. Thomson writes:

There is Agnes Lozelle [sic], in Geiger’s shop, dumb on books but hip with grapefruit, and later the dreamgirl for Joe Brody and Harry Jones, both of whom (if you’ll pardon the remark) are too small for her. Indeed, Marlowe has sized her up and knows how to whip her with words – he understands the b*tch, and she looks at him with the bruised gratitude of someone who knows she’s been understood. What ever happened to Sonia Darrin, who played Agnes?

Darrin is officially uncredited in her role. As Hawks’ biographer, Todd McCarthy, tells the story, Darrin was originally a contender to appear in the film as Carmen Sternwood, the nymphomaniacal sister of Lauren Bacall’s character, Mrs. Rutledge. Ultimately, however, the mercurial Hawks settled on a former model, Martha Vickers, for the Carmen role, relegating Darrin to the supposedly smaller role of Agnes. Although Carmen is pivotal within the film, some of Vickers’ work ended up on the cutting room floor due to censorship concerns and other reconfiguring. As a result, perhaps, Agnes becomes a much more memorable character, especially as she is played by Darrin.

Roger Ebert writes:

One of the best-known of all Hollywood anecdotes involves the movie's confusing plot, based on the equally confusing novel by Raymond Chandler. Lauren Bacall recalls in her autobiography, “One day Bogie came on the set and said to Howard, ‘Who pushed [Owen] Taylor off the pier?’ Everything stopped.” As A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax write in Bogart, “Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwood's chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide. ‘Dammit I didn't know either,’” Chandler recalled.

It is refreshingly consistent with the on-screen persona of Agnes that, as told by McCarthy, Sonia Darrin also had a wry sense of humor:

A sarcastic young woman herself, Darrin was on the set when it was asked who killed Owen Taylor, and she burst out, “It must have been Hawks.”

Thomson’s curiosity about Darrin is echoed by other fans of The Big Sleep. On the IMDB message board for Sonia Darrin, for example, one fan writes: “This is one of the big Hollywood mysteries, considering the importance of The Big Sleep. Note also that she did not receive any credit in the movie, despite the fact that her role was infinitely more important than e.g. Dorothy Malone's, and despite the fact that only Bogart and Bacall (I think) got more screen time than her!! Something really smells here...” Others chime in with similar sentiments, and there are other websites that raise the same question: what happened to Sonia Darrin?

The annals of film history – carelessly curated by the Hollywood studios and pressed piecemeal into tawdry scrapbooks by adoring fans like me – have left us few clues to the identity of Sonia Darrin. She appeared in minor roles in a few more films, but after 1950, she is gone. For awhile one of the only clues was a reference I found to her being involved as a “guest artist” at the Los Angeles Labor Zionists' 4th annual Bikkurim Festival in Griffith Park, held June 10, 1945, in support of a free and democratic Jewish state in Palestine. Other guest artists at the event included Bette Davis, Ernst Deutsch and Joseph Szigeti. I dutifully entered the reference into the Internet Movie Database, hoping that some other Sunday researcher would be able to make something out of it. They never did. Another clue came up in a bit of syndicated gossip from the summer of 1946, in which it was reported that Sonia Darrin, “Warner fledgling,” was seen in the company of press agent Arthur Pine and was “coming East to see him soon.”

I could write my own Big Sleep about how I found Sonia Darrin, but it lacks mood and atmosphere. There’s no misty L.A. in it. There are no unsolved murders and no bookies; I don’t get beat up in it; and frankly, I don’t look so hot in a fedora.

Rock critic Gail Worley writes in her blog in 2007:

If you were, say, over age ten in the early to mid '70s and living in the United States, you will remember [Mason Reese] as the adorably precocious 7 year old spokesperson for Underwood Deviled Ham in the commercial that swept the nation by storm and had everyone mispronouncing the word ‘Smorgasbord.’

Our scene switches from “EXT. MISTY LOS ANGELES STREET - NIGHT” to “INT. ON THE SET OF A DAYTIME TALK SHOW. It is Halloween, October 31, 1973. Mason Reese, a red-headed 3’-8” gnome who talks like he’s a 32-year old trapped in a little boy’s body – using big words and the attitude of a seasoned commentator – is co-hosting for the fourth time with the reigning king of daytime variety/talk, Mike Douglas. Today’s guests are Leonard Nimoy, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, game expert John Scarne, and the beatnik poet/gadfly Tuli Kupferberg and his partner in pop/countercultural crime, Sylvia Topp. Before the week is over, Mason will have the opportunity to quiz the likes of Art Buchwald, Ralph Nader and Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President 1972.

Mason Reese became a bit of a TV phenomenon in the early to mid-1970s, doing commercials not only for Underwood Deviled Ham (through which “Borgasmord” became a household word), but for Dunkin’ Donuts, Ralston Purina, Ivory Snow, Birdseye Frozen French Fries and Thick and Frosty, winning seven Clio awards for his work. Mike Douglas took him on, first as a one-time guest, and later as a temporary co-host, finding his appeal irresistible. He became a children’s reporter for WNBC-TV, worked on a prime-time show with Howard Cosell, and even did a pilot for his own TV series.

Also on hand for some of the Mike Douglas appearances was Mason’s mother, Sonia (see photo below). As Mason writes in his “autobiography,” published at the height of his fame in 1974:

Mommy has red hair, too. When she was a little girl, she lived in Hollywood and became a beautiful actress. She doesn’t act any more, but she’s still beautiful.

Somewhere along the line, Sonia Darrin left Hollywood and did, in fact, go East, meeting and marrying Bill Reese, a one-time theater set designer who eventually ran his own marketing services company, specializing in 3-D design work. She and Bill raised at least 4 children in a stylish place on West End Avenue in Manhattan – Mason, the youngest; daughter Suky; and two older sons, Lanny and Mark.
Mason’s fame faded as he grew older, and eventually he and his family settled into a less visible existence. Mason eventually went into the restaurant business, owning and co-owning a number of places around lower Manhattan, including Nowbar on Seventh Avenue South, Mason’s on Amsterdam Avenue, and Paladar on Ludlow Street.
Hollywood bad-boy director Brett Ratner briefly brought both Mason and Sonia out of retirement in 1990. When Ratner was a film student at NYU, he had a chance meeting with the instantly recognizable Mason Reese on the street. This led to the creation of a bizarre 12-minute film Ratner made as a student project, Whatever Happened to Mason Reese (1990) in which Reese appears as an ex-child star who hangs around with models in limousines and eventually gets gored by a fan whom Reese has humiliated. Reese hurt his leg during the filming, got into some kind of fight with Ratner, and allegedly threatened to tie up the film in litigation; Reese’s voice was later dubbed in by Anthony Michael Hall when the film was finally finished, apparently with dollars begged from Steven Spielberg. It can now be seen as an “extra” on the DVD of Ratner’s hit Hollywood movie, Rush Hour. And Sonia Darrin even got a film credit out of it – “Thanks … Sonia Reese.”

While all of that gives us an inkling of what Sonia Darrin has been up to since The Big Sleep, we’re still left to wonder – where did she come from?
“EXT. – A SAN DIEGO BEACH – THE 1930s.” Sonia Paskowitz sits in the sand and watches as her eldest brother Dorian, a lifeguard, looking like Charles Atlas, chats up a few adoring female sunbathers. “You know, the girls would be drowning,” says Sonia. “They wanted to be rescued by him.”
Louis and Rose Paskowitz landed at Galveston, Texas in the early years of the 20^th century, when Galveston was a common port of entry for Russian Jews. They married and had three children: two sons, Dorian and Adrian, and a daughter, Sonia. Louis opened a dry goods store, but it didn’t survive. Dorian claims that he convinced his parents to move to San Diego after seeing a postcard of some San Diego surfers. In any event, the family moved there in 1934, and Louis found work as a shoe salesman.
Dorian went to Stanford and became a doctor. Adrian studied music, and became a respected music teacher and violinist. Sonia drifted toward Hollywood, and acting.

The realization that Sonia Darrin has been hiding in plain sight all these years, even a couple of years after I managed to draw the connection between Sonia and her son Mason Reese, really hit me with the release of Doug Pray’s documentary Surfwise (2007), in which the unorthodox life of Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, his wife Juliette and their 9 children is chronicled. In it, we learn that Doc Paskowitz led his family on a relentless quest for freedom and health, moving from beach to beach in their 24-foot camper and eventually opening a surf camp in Southern California. We watch as Doc, Juliette and each of the 9 children tell us, from their own individual perspectives, about their nomadic, bohemian lifestyle, their strict “health food” diet (no fat, no sugar, no exceptions), and the requirement that each and every one of them surf, as often as possible.Also on hand, providing her outsider’s view of Dorian Paskowitz and his family, is Sonia Darrin, Dorian’s little sister. Sonia talks about her brother’s stubbornness and the harsh conditions his family sometimes suffered, and explains how she took in two of Dorian’s sons in New York when they decided to rebel against their father’s iron regime.She has red hair now – just like her son Mason wrote in his autobiography. Her green eyes light up with that sly intelligence when she smiles, and the years cannot hide that melodic quality in her voice, the one that you can hear in each line she delivered in The Big Sleep, over 60 years ago. Sonia Darrin – truly hiding in plain sight -- appearing on The Mike Douglas Show in the 1970s and in a documentary film about her brother in 2007, risking detection but somehow escaping it.The word on the street is that Sonia Paskowitz Reese, better known as Sonia Darrin, is around 80 years old (which would’ve meant she was around 17 when she was making The Big Sleep) and that she is now living in New York. I’m sure she has even better stories about her life than the ones we can glean through public sources.It is kind of tempting to think of Agnes Lowzier speeding off into the desert on that misty night in L.A., meeting up with a traveling theater troupe as the clouds parted somewhere outside of Barstow, sidling up to a tall, handsome stage carpenter and eventually settling down and having a child who would be known for his expressive wisecracks … ah, but that is conflating fiction with reality -- and really, do we need to do that here? Sonia Darrin’s reality has enough twists and turns and notes of interest that there is probably no need for it.

The Adventures of Jane Adams

In 1980, I was doing some research on the horror film actor Rondo Hatton and was going through the motions of figuring out whether any of his co-stars were still alive, so that I could interview them about their recollections of him. Not many of them were around, but I did manage to find Arthur Lubin (director of Rondo’s The Spider Woman Strikes Back, 1946, but better known as the director of a few Abbott and Costello films and some episodes of Mr. Ed), who was very kind but had little to say about Mr. Hatton.

Research projects tend to beget research projects. One of Hatton’s co-stars, a pretty, blue-eyed, auburn-haired actress named Jane Adams, was listed in David Ragan’s Who’s Who in Hollywood as a “lost player,” someone who had completely disappeared after her film career ended. Ragan was possibly among the more qualified people to have made that assessment, as Who’s Who in Hollywood was probably the definitive source, at the time, of information about the then-current activities and residences of actors and actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

To me, however, it was a challenge. I started by making an appointment to read files at the Margaret Herrick Library, the research archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Its biographical files contain photos, clippings, press releases and studio materials for thousands of film people – from bit players to stars to studio heads. Unfortunately, the Jane Adams files were pretty sparse. They contained a couple of stills of Adams from the film The Egg and I (which is a film that is not among Ms. Adams' official credits) and two versions of a Universal Studios official bio.

According to the bio, Jane Adams was born Betty Jane Bierce on this day in 1921 in San Antonio, Texas. She moved to California with her parents, and, it said, following testing at age 4, she was revealed to have the second highest I.Q. in California. She apparently later went on to become an accomplished violinist, a student at the Pasadena Playhouse and ultimately a model in New York City before going under contract with Universal Studios, appearing as "Poni Adams" in a number of routine horse operas. At last her name was changed "Jane Adams" -- with the idea that it might lead to more dignified roles. Instead she was cast memorably as the beautiful hunchbacked nurse in the Universal monster-fest, House of Dracula (1944; with John Carradine and Lon Chaney, Jr.) and the blind piano teacher in The Brute Man (1946, with the aforementioned Rondo Hatton).

After a brief hiatus during the late 1940s, Adams returned to do a few more Westerns, and appeared on some episodes of Kit Carson, The Cisco Kid and The Adventures of Superman on TV. She retired from the business in 1953. The only clue to her later life was a single line from her studio bio that stated that she had “married Lt. Thomas K. Turnage, U.S. Army” in 1945. Before the Internet, of course, a clue such as this was little more than an invitation to hours of tedious phone book hunting. I spent a day at a local library picking through old phone books from across the country, looking for Turnages. It seemed like a dead end, and I put the file away.

The next part of the story is an illustration of the occasional serendipity of historical research, the awesome poltergeistian power of coincidence in the service of solving minor mysteries.

A few months after my phone book binge, I was sitting in the kitchen of my parents’ house in Southern California, with my Hatton files spread out in front of me on the breakfast table. Across from me was a little black and white TV set, and on it was the 11 o’clock news, to which I had tuned in anticipation of Johnny Carson’s monologue at 11:30. I ran across the Jane Adams subfile and opened it. There again I saw the line about Miss Adams’ marriage to Lt. Turnage. Then, as if the clouds in my kitchen had parted and let loose a bolt of white sunlight, the news anchor on the TV led into a taped clip by saying, “President Reagan’s executive assistant on military manpower, General Thomas K. Turnage, explained that …” I looked up to see General Turnage talking to reporters about some pressing issue concerning military conscription and the U.S. Selective Service.

My parents wondered what the commotion in the kitchen was all about. The next morning, I started to do some newspaper research on General Turnage, and by the end of the day, I had found an entry on him in a Who’s Who publication that listed his wife’s name as “Betty Jane Smith,” and an address (200 N. Pickett Street, Alexandria, Virginia). A phone number was only a step away.

I was 17 years old. I was eligible for Selective Service registration the next year. I was dealing with the wife of an advisor to the president. So, naturally, I chickened out. I never made any effort to contact the former Jane Adams.

I did, however, dutifully return to the Margaret Herrick Library with a neatly penned anonymous message on an index card, which read more or less as follows:

Jane Adams is married to General Thomas Turnage, President Reagan’s executive assistant for military manpower. Her address is 200 N. Pickett Street, Alexandria, Virginia.

I placed the card in the Jane Adams file in the Library, and then forgot about the whole thing.

Years later, while in a book shop in Southern California, I found a quickie reference work on B horror movies or westerns in which the author had tracked down Jane Adams, now retired with General Turnage in Rancho Mirage, California, and interviewed her. I like to assume that my anonymous message helped. In her interview, Ms. Adams recalls:

On July 14, 1945, I married Tom Turnage. We recently celebrated our golden wedding anniversary. [A brief marriage to an Annapolis cadet ended tragically as he was killed in action on his first mission during WWII.] I wanted to be with Tom, whose career kept us traveling constantly. It was only when he was sent to Korea that I came back and did those TV shows. I wanted to be a housewife, mother and travel. That’s something I couldn’t do as an actress … I’m very happy in Palm Springs … I loved working in serials and westerns – it was very exciting. My life has been a great adventure.

I felt a pang of regret that I never contacted her.

General Turnage passed away in 2000, and was given a burial with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Under President Reagan, he was not only an executive on the President’s military manpower task force, but he served as the director of the Selective Service, and finally as the last administrator of the U.S. Veterans Administration, from 1986 to 1989 – prior to the job’s elevation to a cabinet-level post as the Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs.

Pride of the Yankees

Baseball legend Lou Gehrig was born on this day in 1903 in New York City.

A high school sports star, Henry Louis Gehrig was declared ineligible for athletics at Columbia University because he had signed a professional contract with the Hartford minor league team. He played for 2 years with Hartford before joining the Yankees as their starting first baseman in 1925.

In 17 seasons with the Yankees, he knocked in over 100 runs 13 times, leading the league 5 times, and he hit 493 home runs, second at that time only to his friend and fellow Yankee slugger, Babe Ruth. The 1927 Yankees were considered the greatest baseball squad of all time, and the Yankees themselves considered Gehrig, who hit .373 with 47 home runs and 175 runs batted in (a record at the time), to be their most valuable player. In 1931, he set another record for RBIs (184), and in 1934, Gehrig won the Triple Crown, leading the American League in batting (.363), home runs (49) and RBIs (165) -- all the while playing in every single game of every single season -- beating the previous record of 1,307 consecutive games, set by Everett Scott in 1925, during the 1933 season.

In contrast to his pal the Babe, the gentlemanly Gehrig didn't smoke, drink, gamble or carouse, and was singularly devoted to his mother (legend has it she had to scold him into leaving her bedside to play in the 1927 World Series after she had undergone surgery). In 1933, when he married debutante Eleanor Twitchell, he became a singularly devoted (and teachable) husband, bending to Eleanor's tastes in art and literature and taking her advice on opening up to the fans.

With life going as well as anyone could imagine, during the 1938 season Gehrig felt he had not played up to his own standards (although he still hit 29 homers, including his record 23rd career grand slam, and batted in 114 runs), so in the spring of 1939 he put himself through an exhausting physical regimen to get into better shape; but as the season began, it became clear that something was wrong. On May 2, he told manager Joe McCarthy to put in his backup, Babe Dahlgren, because, as Gehrig said, "I'm not doing the club any good out there." With that, Gehrig ended a remarkable streak, playing a record 2,130 consecutive games (a mark that would only be broken 56 years later by Cal Ripken).

Soon afterward, Gehrig discovered that he was suffering from the early stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative muscle disease that would come to be known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease." On July 4, 1939, the Yankees held a farewell testimonial day for Gehrig, during which he addressed the crowd in a moment considered by many to be among the most emotionally intense in the history of sports, telling the world: "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

(Proving that the moment has entered our pop culture consciousness indelibly enough to be trodden upon, Norm MacDonald provided a theoretical follow-up to Gehrig's moment at the microphone on an episode of Saturday Night Live: "I was being sarcastic! I am the unluckiest man in the world! I have a disease so rare they named it after me!").

After Gehrig's retirement, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Gehrig to be a New York City parole commissioner, a job at which he worked conscientiously while lending his time to youth groups. He died on June 2, 1941 in Riverdale, New York at the age of 38, two years after entering baseball's Hall of Fame in a special election. Lou and Eleanor were played by Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright in the classic film The Pride of the Yankees (1942), which both lovingly drew upon and fortified the Gehrig legend.

Stanley

Stan Laurel was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, England on this day in 1890.

The "thin" half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, Stan Jefferson was born into a family of British stage performers, and sought a stage career from an early age. Stan earned his first stage appearance on his own comic merits at 16; and when his father witnessed his son's talents, he arranged for young Stan to join a traveling pantomime company. By 1910, he was working with Fred Karno's Troupe, one of the best companies in England, clowning alongside (and sometimes as understudy to) Charlie Chaplin. When Chaplin left the Troupe during a tour of the U.S. to join Mack Sennett's Keystone movie studio in 1912, Stan decided to stay on in the U.S. to try American vaudeville, shortly thereafter adopting the name "Laurel" to avoid the bad luck of using the 13-lettered "Jefferson."

In 1917, Laurel began starring in short comedy films, often writing and assisting with direction; but in about 9 years he failed to make much of a mark, jumping from studio to studio. He joined the Hal Roach studio in 1926 as a gag writer, but was eventually persuaded to team with Roach contract player Oliver "Babe" Hardy in a series of short silent comedies, many directed by Leo McCarey. Together, Laurel and Hardy made more than 100 films (27 of them full-length features), bridging the gap between silent and talking pictures and becoming the most enduring comedy team in screen history.

Always a craftsman, Laurel took a special interest in writing the scenarios and was known to spend hours in the cutting room, painstakingly pacing the team's sequences. By contrast, Babe Hardy loved to play and eat and drink (and he was probably a gambling addict). In a role reversal of sorts, on-screen Hardy was the putative leader of the two derby'd man-children known as Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. Sputtering with frustration, the on-screen Laurel could barely transfer a clue from one hand to the other, and would inevitably dig them into a precarious mess, registering his fear through blinking sobs and head-scratching. The really distinctive aspect of the team, however, was their giant hearts. There was little meanness in them on screen, either to each other or to any bystander. When things went wrong, they frequently knew it was their own fault, and when things went well, they received it as good fortune, linked arms, and frequently broke out into song. Contrasts aside, Laurel and Hardy were great friends off-screen, frequently vacationing together.

Laurel's only professional separation from Hardy from 1924 until Hardy's death in 1957 was during Laurel's contract dispute with Roach, during which Hardy starred with veteran comic Harry Langdon in Zenobia (1939). In tribute to his friend, Laurel retired from performing upon Hardy's death, but continued to ply the art of comedy as a writer. He died on February 23, 1965 in Santa Monica, California.

Never, Never Believe It

"If you are lucky enough to be a success, by all means enjoy the applause and the adulation of the public. But never, never believe it." -- Robert Montgomery.

Robert Montgomery was born Henry Montgomery, Jr. on this day in 1904 in Fishkill Landing, New York, the son of a rubber company executive.

Montgomery is remembered today, if at all, as the father of Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery, but his film and TV career is notable in its own right, for his contributions both on and off the screen.

After a few years acting on Broadway, Montgomery arrived in Hollywood for the beginning of the Sound Era, and as a prep-school educated boy with patrician good looks, he fell easily into the role of the devil-may-care, tuxedo-wearing playboy. He managed to rise above the bluntness of his typecasting in a few films here and there, including The Big House (1930), Private Lives (1931), Hitchcock's comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and They Were Expendable (1945), and was nominated for best actor Oscars for his performances as a psychotic murderer in Night Must Fall (1937) and as the boxer in a playboy's body in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) --the inspiration for Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978).

He served four terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, beginning in 1935, during a time when Hollywood producers weren't interested in letting actors unionize under any circumstances. The fate of the fledgling organization was uncertain, but under Montgomery's leadership, the Screen Actors Guild boycotted the 1936 Academy Awards and voted to strike on May 10, 1937, causing the major studios to sign the first SAG minimum wage contract, one that applied equally to stunt men and extras under Montgomery's insistence.

Montgomery also managed to stare down a threat from the Capone mob. Capone had his hooks into the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which had managed to extract tribute money from Hollywood producers around the time that SAG was being born. Seeing SAG as a threat to his neat little arrangement, Capone tried to intimidate Montgomery by sending thugs around to slash his tires. Montgomery stood firm, however, invited the FBI into the mix, and ultimately cooperated with the Feds to get Capone's lieutenant Willie Bioff sent to prison.

The same sense of public duty that inspired him in his role with SAG was aroused by the conflict in Europe, and in 1940, Montgomery secretly went to France for several weeks to drive an ambulance. Shortly after he returned, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and Montgomery was placed in the Intelligence Section in London. Later, he served as an operations officer on a destroyer during the D-Day invasion, saw action at Guadalcanal, and commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific. He retired from the Navy with the rank of commander in 1944.

While continuing to act, he made his mark as an actor-director in Lady in the Lake (1947), the first Hollywood film to employ the subjective camera point of view of its protagonist for an entire feature. Montgomery starred as detective Philip Marlowe, but was seen on screen only at the odd moment when he might catch his own reflection in a mirror. "YOU do get into the story and see things pretty much the way the protagonist, Phillip Marlowe, does, but YOU don't have to suffer the bruises he does," noted the New York Times. "Of course, YOU don't get a chance to put your arms around Audrey Totter either. After all, the movie makers, for all their ingenuity, can go just so far in the quest for realism." Overall, the film was received as a curiosity, an interesting failure as a Hollywood film, but one that certainly confirmed Montgomery's willingness to take an artistic risk.

In the 1950s, Montgomery became the first effective political media consultant of the television age as an adviser to President Eisenhower, helping the ex-general to harness the new medium. In a particularly spectacular coup during the run-up to the 1956 election, Montgomery managed to convince CBS to air a birthday tribute to the president's wife Mamie in March 1956 -- never mind that the first lady's birthday was actually in November. Seeing Nixon's disastrous performance in the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, Eisenhower is reported to have remarked that "Montgomery would never have let him look like he did in that first television debate."

Montgomery died on September 27, 1981 in New York City.

James Stewart

One of several Hollywood actors of the 1930s to emerge as "common man heroes" (Fonda, Cooper and Wayne were among the others), Jimmy Stewart always seemed to be a few shades closer to "common man" than "hero." Tall and gangly, shy, with a rural drawl and a nervous stutter, Stewart's persona was essentially that of a nice guy -- an earnest, well-meaning, perhaps easily distracted young man who was typically thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but who could tear his way through such circumstances with guts and an unshakeable sense of right.

Stewart, who was born on this day in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, was a small-town boy who studied architecture at Princeton. His appearance in a Princeton revue led classmate Josh Logan to convince Stewart to join the University Players in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where he met Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. Stewart and roommate Fonda earned their keep on Broadway for a few years, and went to Hollywood in 1935.

Fonda's success was slightly earlier, as Stewart floundered through boy-ingénue roles, but Frank Capra snagged Stewart in 1938 for You Can't Take it With You, which turned out to be a mere tryout for Stewart's first tour-de-force, Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939, with Jean Arthur), the story of a boy scout leader tapped to be a U.S. senator, only to be framed on corruption charges. After winning an Oscar for performing slightly against type as a wise-cracking writer in The Philadelphia Story (1941, with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant), Stewart became the first Hollywood star to enlist in the military for what would become World War II -- before the attack on Pearl Harbor -- rising to the rank of Air Force colonel, flying over 1,000 combat missions and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross (he would ultimately earn the rank of brigadier general in the Air Force Reserves).

America had grown up after the war, and with it, so did Stewart's persona. His first film after the war, the classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946, again by Capra), the story of a common man driven to the mortal brink of desperation only to brought back through a spiritual epiphany, a whimsical but ultimately terrifying encounter with an angel, was like a diary of the transformation of Stewart's film identity; with rare exception after the war (notably Harvey, 1950), the quirky, bumbling Stewart gave way to Stewart the tough guy -- still a small town guy with small town values, clever and charming at times, but a man of action, not above being ruthless.

Hitchcock played upon the contrast between the young Stewart and the prickly Stewart of middle-age in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1958); but films such as Anatomy of a Murder (1959, his fourth Oscar nomination), the Westerns Winchester '73 (1950), Broken Arrow (1950) and John Ford's Two Rode Together (1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), showed an almost irretrievably hard-bitten side of his persona, a side that knew through personal experience that war is hell.

Among the first stars to negotiate a portion of the profits from his productions, he eased slowly into retirement with a couple of TV series (The Jimmy Stewart Show, 1971-2; Hawkins, 1973-4) and occasional talk show appearances, having attained the status of one of the best loved actors from the golden age of Hollywood. He died July 2, 1997 in Los Angeles, California.

Ice Queen

Sonja Henie was born on this day in 1912 in Kristiana, Norway.

The blonde, blue-eyed ingénue who dominated and changed the style of international figure skating competition also turned out to be a cunning marketeer, a trait she may have inherited from her father, a leading Norwegian furrier who owned the first automobile in Oslo. Sonja Henie learned to ski almost as soon as she could walk, but by 5 she was immersed in studying dance with Love Krohn, teacher of the great ballerina Anna Pavlova. With Pavlova as her role model-by-proxy, she began to skate at age 6, taking her first Norwegian championship at age 10.

As a tiny 12 year old, Henie competed in her first Olympics in 1924 at Chamonix, placing 8th; but 2 years later she was challenging the 1924 gold medallist, Herma Planck-Szabo of Austria, placing a close 2nd to her in the 1926 world championships. On her way up the international rankings, she also drew raves for her short skirts, which better emphasized her graceful leg work, as opposed to the long skirts worn by her competitors. In 1927, Henie unseated Planck-Szabo in a controversial competition in which 3 out of 5 judges were Norwegian. Her breakthrough world championship in 1927 would, however, prove to be the first of an entire decade of uninterrupted major victories.

That year she also tentatively began her film career, appearing in a Norwegian film, Seven Days for Elizabeth. In 1928, she stretched the confines of figure skating as a sport by introducing dance routines into freeskating, and won her first of 3 Olympic gold medals at St. Moritz. By the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, her international competitors, British pre-teen Cecilia Colledge notable among them, were imitating her costumes, dance style and spinning repertoire, but Henie was still the unanimous choice for the gold medal.

In 1936, Henie announced that she would retire from amateur skating following the Olympics and the subsequent world championship to be held the following week, and although she succeeded in winning the gold and the world championship, this time she received stiff competition from Colledge. She obviously knew when to quit (ending her career with 14 national championships, 8 European championships and 10 world championships in addition to the Olympic gold medals), and how to proceed on her next career choice: within a year, Henie was in Hollywood with a contract from 20th Century-Fox, and her first American musical, One in a Million, became a huge hit.

Henie was not much of an actress (and "her accent was as thick as her ankles," as Schickel observed), but her skating numbers and her sunny persona served her well in a number of light musicals, including Thin Ice (1937), Happy Landing (1938) and Sun Valley Serenade (1941, with Glenn Miller); in 1938, she was ranked as the 3rd most popular box office attraction, after Clark Gable and Shirley Temple.

By the mid-1940s, however, fans were growing tired of her movies, so she took the big dollars she earned in Hollywood and poured them into her Hollywood Ice Revue traveling show (of which she was the star), exhibiting her typical combination of drive and perfectionism in assuring the quality of her productions. After two American marriages, she married her Norwegian childhood sweetheart, a shipowner, at 44. When she died of leukemia at 57 (in an airplane en route from Paris to Oslo), she was worth over $47 million.

Just the Facts

Jack Webb was born on this day in 1920 in Santa Monica, California.

Webb began his career as a radio announcer in San Francisco, but very shortly thereafter he was producing and starring in his own radio police-drama series, Dragnet (1949-52). Although he appeared in movies from time to time (in Dark City, 1950, he was a giddy, pencil-necked jazz fiend named "Augie"), Webb was a bona fide law enforcement groupie, and he made Dragnet his life's franchise, debuting it on television in 1952.

As the laconic "Sgt. Joe Friday" Webb wore gray suits with white shirts and narrow ties, trundling (almost marching) down the corridors of the L.A.P.D., his arms stiff at his sides. "Casual clothes" meant a white shirt with the top button open, revealing a white crewneck T-shirt underneath, and "being casual" meant listening to the hi-fi and grilling steaks at his spartan bachelor flat. Friday did not give the impression of being a master of detection or psychological gamesmanship, as Peter Falk would be as "Columbo"; rather, Joe Friday was an average Joe, pursuing "just the facts" without distraction, getting the job done. He's so square, he's cool.

During the first incarnation of the TV series, Ben Alexander played Friday's main partner, "Officer Frank Smith" (1953-59); after 8 years on hiatus, Webb revived the series in what became its better remembered version (1967-70), co-starring Harry Morgan as his quirky partner "Bill Gannon." Webb also produced Emergency (1972-77), a series about Los Angeles paramedics (co-starring his ex-wife Julie London and her husband Bobby Troup) and Adam-12 (1968-75), a show about L.A. patrol cops (with Martin Milner and Kent McCord).

Webb passed away on December 23, 1982 in West Hollywood.

Honegger

Arthur Honegger was born on this day in 1892 in Le Havre, France of Swiss parentage.

In his chamber music, orchestral music and oratorios, Honegger exhibited a broad range of styles, from music reminiscent of the 18th century to very modern compositions, as well as an eclectic quirkiness in subject matter and form. Although he was a close friend of Darius Milhaud and was grouped with Milhaud as one of "Les Six," a clique of young Paris composers who had clustered around the mastery of Erik Satie during the 1920s, Honegger held the germanic composers Mozart and Bach as his musical heroes -- the only member of Les Six to stand in opposition to Satie’s gallo-centrism and sardonic disengagement.

Honegger’s reputation stands mainly on his King David oratorio (1921), composed for the Mezieres folk theater in Lausanne, Switzerland, but among his other idiosyncratic works are the famous "mimed symphony," Horace Victorieux (1921); musical portraits of a locomotive (Pacific 231, 1924) and a rugby game (Rugby, 1928); an opera based on Rostand’s L’Aiglon (1937); and a ballet for one voice, orchestra and a Martenot Musical Wave machine, Semiramis (1924). The gimmickry of such pieces tends to overshadow the dramatic power he was capable of displaying in such pieces as Jeanne d’Arc au bucher (1935), an oratorio with a libretto by Paul Claudel, and the film scores for Abel Gance’s Napoleon and Les Miserables (1934).

Hollywood Hack

When the American Film Institute released its list of the Top 100 American films of all-time in 1998, some film buffs were a little surprised to find that two of the top 10 -- Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939) -- were credited to someone named Victor Fleming. No one, however, has ever made the case that Victor Fleming was one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, or that he was even a very important American filmmaker.

Fleming, who was born on this day in 1883 in Pasadena, California, was, basically, a Hollywood hack. He started in film as a chauffeur, fixing director Allan Dwan's car, and through that connection he eventually worked as a cameraman on a number of Douglas Fairbanks films. From there he graduated to directing. During the silent period, he gained a reputation for making bad films which made a profit (as well as for bedding Clara Bow), and landed at MGM with the coming of the talkies, frequently working with Clark Gable.

In 1939, he took over The Wizard of Oz, which had been started by Richard Thorpe and George Cukor, and directed about 45% of Gone With the Wind, before and after suffering a nervous breakdown (with Cukor and Sam Wood directing the rest). He managed to ruin neither film, despite having slapped Judy Garland's face when she was being difficult on the set of Oz.

To be fair, he was an excellent technician, which made him well-suited to action pictures such as Captains Courageous (1937, with Spencer Tracy) and Test Pilot (1943, with both Tracy and Gable), but he did not have the personal skills to obtain superior performances from actors in need of guidance.

Fleming died January 6, 1946 in Arizona.

S.J. Perelman

Sidney Joseph Perelman -- better known as "S.J." -- was born on this day in 1904 in Brooklyn, New York.

A graduate of Brown University, Perelman wrote comic vignettes for magazines but was little appreciated until the publication of a collection of his articles, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge (1929). Despite the fact that his name was left off the title page of the first edition (unintentionally), Perelman gained a national readership for his outrageous wordplay, non sequitirs and puns. Shortly thereafter he moved to Hollywood, where he wrote for the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business, 1931; Horse Feathers, 1932) and continued writing magazine pieces, showing an increasingly angry and nihilist comic persona, while contributing to other Hollywood scripts. He won an Oscar for his work on the script for Around the World in 80 Days (1956, with David Niven).

Once asked by an earnest interviewer how many drafts he wrote of his stories, Perelman replied, in typical wise-ass fashion, "Thirty-seven. I once tried doing 33, but something was lacking, a certain -- how shall I say? -- je ne sais quoi. On another occasion, I tried 42 versions, but the final effect was too lapidary -- you know what I mean, Jack? What the hell are you trying to extort -- my trade secrets?"

Perelman died on October 17, 1979 in New York City.

Dame in the Water

Reviewing the career of champion swimmer Eleanor Holm, it strikes one that if hard-drinking, hard-partying baseball great Mickey Mantle had the stamina of Miss Holm, he might have had a longer career, and would have been, indisputably, the greatest baseball player ever. Heck, Eleanor Holm trained on "champagne and cigarettes" (to use her own words), and was one of the finest backstrokers ever, living to age 90. Too bad Mickey was such a lightweight!

Eleanor Holm was born on this day in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a fireman. By the time Holm was 14, she was already competing in the Olympics, finishing 5th in the 1928 100-meter backstroke. By 1932, despite taking a career detour as a Ziegfeld Follies dancer at age 16, Holm was indisputably the best backstroker in the world, setting new world records at every distance between 1929 and 1932. She won the 1932 Olympic gold medal in the 100-meters, setting a new world record in Los Angeles which bested the previous standard by almost three seconds.

Her performance in Los Angeles, combined with her trim good looks and vivacity led to her signing a $500 per week contract with Warner Brothers to appear in films. She soon quarreled with the Warners, however, since they wanted her to swim on film, which would have jeopardized her amateur status, so she quit. In 1933 she married bandleader Art Jarrett and traveled with him as the band's singer, burning the candle at both ends while remaining undefeated in numerous swim competitions and establishing new world records in the 100- and 200-meters.

On her way to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, she partied round the clock with sportswriters aboard the S.S. Manhattan, drinking with the likes of writer Charles MacArthur, smoking and gambling. When U.S. Olympic czar Avery Brundage learned of her behavior, he banned Holm from competing in Berlin, accusing her of being drunk and disorderly. While she admitted drinking heavily, she pointed out that she won a couple of hundred dollars shooting craps, which someone who was intoxicated wouldn't be able to do. Brundage didn't find the argument very amusing (despite receiving a petition signed by more than half of the U.S. Olympic team members to let her back in), and Holm found herself in Berlin, banned for life from amateur competition, but nevertheless enjoying a white-hot celebrity glow. Goering, for one, was captivated by her, and gave her a sterling silver swastika (which she later had reset with a Star of David in the middle).

In 1937, Holm returned to Hollywood to star in Tarzan's Revenge with Olympic decathlete Glenn Morris, and after divorcing Jarrett married show business promoter Billy Rose, starring in his 1939 New York World's Fair Aquacade. She divorced Rose in 1954 (the saga was labeled the "War of the Roses" by the tabloids), and settled in Miami Beach working as an interior decorator. She entered the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1966 and was one of the first six women to be selected for induction in the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame. She died on January 31, 2004 in Miami.

The Fetish of Tragedy

Film director Fritz Lang was born on this day in 1890 in Vienna.

Following the wishes of his architect father, Lang studied architecture for a time before joining the Vienna Academy of Graphic Arts to pursue a course in painting. Facing his father's disapproval, Lang moved to Brussels around 1909 and made his living selling sketches. In 1910, he took to the sea, visiting North Africa, Asia Minor, China, Japan and Bali before settling in Paris, renting a studio at Montmartre and studying at the Academie Julien.

During World War I, Lang found himself in the Austrian Army; blinded in one eye after being wounded, Lang spent his time in military hospitals writing film scripts. He wrote several scripts for Erich Pommer's Decla film company in Berlin before directing his first film, The Half-Caste (1919), followed by the first episode of a popular adventure serial, The Spiders (1919). He was slated to direct Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) based upon a scenario to which he contributed, but instead he was assigned to direct another episode of The Spiders serial; Caligari became a classic in the hands of Robert Wiene.

Annoyed at losing Caligari, Lang left Decla for a time, but returned to direct his first international success, Destiny (1921), the visual style of which caused comparisons to Durer and Grunewald in the French journals. From a thematic perspective, Destiny also typified Lang's preoccupation with despair and the inevitability of fate, or as Lang himself described it, his "fetish of tragedy." In 1922, he completed Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, the first of a series of films featuring the fiendish criminal mastermind, which he followed with two films based on the German legend Die Nieblungen (Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge, 1924). In 1926, Lang completed the greatest of his silent films, Metropolis (with Brigitte Helm), a social melodrama set in the year 2000 against "an exaggerated dream of the New York skyline, multiplied a thousandfold and divested of all reality." (L. Eisner)

Although Metropolis was not a box office success, Lang's preeminence among German directors was assured as he began work on his first sound film, M (1930; with Peter Lorre), a film about how the criminal underground organizes to capture a child murderer whose activities are bad for business. In 1934, Lang arrived in the U.S., where he made a pair of dark, moralistic character studies, Fury (1936; starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney) and You Only Live Once (1937; with Sidney and Henry Fonda).

Lang's early efforts in Hollywood did not endear him to the studios, which favored light material with happy endings, nor did his insistence on detail. Nevertheless, Lang survived, making such eerie minor classics as the stark western, The Return of Frank James (1940; with Fonda); a Graham Greene mystery, Ministry of Fear (1944; with Ray Milland); the twin nightmares Woman in the Window (1944; written by Nunnally Johnson) and Scarlet Street (1945) (both with Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea); and The Big Heat (1953; with Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin). His career went into sharp decline after 1956, although his films continued to be appreciated by younger film directors; in homage to Lang, Jean-Luc Godard cast Lang as himself in Contempt (1963). Lang died on August 2, 1976 in Beverly Hills.

Busby

Busby Berkeley -- born William Berkeley Enos on this day in 1895 in Los Angeles -- grew up in the theater: his parents were performers in a traveling repertory company, and Berkeley was nicknamed "Busby" after stage actress Amy Busby, one of the stars of his parents' troupe. Berkeley's parents shipped him off to a military academy and by 1914 Berkeley was a management trainee at a Massachusetts shoe factory.

In 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in France during World War I, where he had his first experiences in conducting large numbers of people through complex marching patterns as a field artillery lieutenant, working out a trick drill for 1,200 men.

Returning to the states, he entered the theater as an actor, significantly in the role of fashion designer "Madame Lucy" in a Broadway revival of Irene (1923-26). Soon, however, he was serving as dance director for Broadway productions, despite the fact that he had never taken a dancing lesson in his life, bluffing his way through choreography sessions by getting his dancers to demonstrate what he had in mind. By 1930, he was one of the most sought after dance directors on Broadway with a reputation for devising intricate dance spectacles involving staircases and multi-layered platforms.

He went to Hollywood in 1930 to direct dance numbers for an Eddie Cantor vehicle, Whoopee, in which Berkeley stretched the envelope of static early sound film technique, forcing his director to enter the realm of pure cinema by lifting the camera above the soundstage to see Berkeley's dancers form geometric patterns. In 42nd Street (with Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell) and Footlight Parade (with Keeler, Powell and James Cagney) (both 1933; directed by Lloyd Bacon) and in later Warner Brothers musicals, Berkeley emerged as a true screen original, choreographing elaborate dance numbers involving hundreds of dancers moving in syncopated precision on oversized sets, through waterfalls and giant swimming pools, and on winding staircases and aerial platforms -- or as described by one film critic: "kaleidoscopic patterns of female flesh, dissolving into artichokes, exploding stars, snowflakes and the expanding leaves of water lillies."

His interest in using the camera and editing in inventive ways to highlight his production numbers led him to try directing, which he did successfully in a variety of musicals, including Babes in Arms (1939; with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) and The Gang's All Here (1943; with Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda).

Among the stars who got their start as Berkeley dancers were Lucille Ball, Paulette Goddard and Betty Grable. As musicals fell out of favor in the late 1950s, however, so did Berkeley, but his reputation re-emerged in the 1970s as Berkeley's work became celebrated as one of the essential liberating influences of 1930s cinema. Berkeley died on March 14, 1976.

Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols was born on this day in 1931 in Berlin.

The grandsons of Jewish socialist/anarchist Gustav Landauer and opera librettist Hedwig Lachmann, Michael Peschkowsky and his brother Robert were sent by their family from Nazi Germany to live with an English family in America in 1938; their parents followed shortly thereafter, and they adopted the surname "Nichols" after his father's Russian patronymic "Nicholaiyevitch." Although the family was impoverished, Mike Nichols attended private schools on scholarship (with a reported IQ of 180); but he was a loner, the sour-tongued bald kid (having lost all of his hair at age 4 due to a reaction to a whooping cough vaccination) with the German accent.

At the University of Chicago, he got a job as a staff announcer on a classical music station (shedding the German accent for a crisply sophisticated American one), but he found his real outlet in the theater. Paul Sills, the founder of The Compass improv group (later called Second City), brought his friend Elaine May to see Nichols on stage, telling her "I want you to meet the only person at the University of Chicago who is as hostile as you." Nichols and May got into each other's respective craws immediately, and in 1957 they began performing deadpan comic dialogues on stage at The Compass that were so close to being straight that you could cut the gender-tension with a knife. Their comedy emerged directly from the ambiguous negotiations of this man and this woman -- whether it was a "romantic spat between dentist and hygienist during oral surgery" or a pair of hopeful pseudo-intellectual singles discussing Bartok and Nietzsche. They released a popular record of their material (Improvisations to Music, 1958), appeared on radio and TV, and from Chicago they played their act to critical acclaim on Broadway in 1960. The record of their Broadway show, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, won a Grammy in 1961, but in that year they abruptly announced their break-up; according to Nichols, he gave it up because satire got too trendy.

Nichols turned to directing (avoiding writing almost altogether), winning his first 2 of 7 Tony Awards for his productions of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1964) and The Odd Couple (1965). He made his debut as a film director with a well-received version of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), but Nichols was hailed as the great new director of his generation with The Graduate (1967; best director Oscar), a film that focused on 20-somethings before it was trendy to do so, used a contemporary score (by Simon and Garfunkel), and featured the lemony Dustin Hoffman as a rather unconventional leading man.

With Hollywood at his feet, Nichols' natural orneriness, perhaps, led him to take on a series of offbeat challenges as follow-up projects, including a disappointing version of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1970) and the sexually candid Carnal Knowledge (1971). After The Fortune (1975, with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty), he returned to the theater for a time, but reemerged in Hollywood with Silkwood (1983). During the 1980s and 90s, he turned out a series of more conventional, immaculately realized comedies with stellar casts, such as Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), Wolf (1994), The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998). In 2001 he won an Emmy for his HBO production of Wit (with Emma Thompson) and scored another triumph with the HBO mini-series based on Tony Kushner's Angels in America (2003).