Nichols had one phone number in his pocket, and it was all he needed. He and May were in New York City with $40 in borrowed money, the names of a couple of friends willing to let them sleep on their sofas, and a single contact. An actress he had known from his Strasberg days was married to an associate of Jack Rollins, a talent manager who could book singers, comedians, and novelty acts into any club in town. They got an appointment, visited Rollins in his small office, and did fifteen or twenty minutes of material. First they showed him “Teenagers,” then they tried out an idea they had started to develop in Chicago. They asked Rollins to suggest a first line and a last line and told him they would invent a scene for him on the spot. May riffed; Nichols moved her along when he sensed the time was right. “Elaine would go on forever if you let her,” said Rollins. “She was insanely creative but had no sense of when to quit. Mike [was] Mr. Practical.” They won him over. “[I thought] my God! I am finding two people who are writing hilarious comedy on their feet,” he said. “They did things that were taboo in those days . . . they would uncover dark little niches that you felt but never had expressed. They expressed it for you.” It was done. They were in. “They were remarkable,” Rollins said. “They were complete. I knew they had something odd and wonderful, but I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” That day he took them out to lunch at the Russian Tea Room and signed them. They were relieved when he picked up the check. In the late 1950s, supper-club culture was still a thriving New York scene, with full houses, big names, and a cadre of columnists covering every up and down, and Rollins got them an audition at one of the most popular of the East Side cabarets, the Blue Angel. The owner, Max Gordon, was as impressed as Rollins had been, and offered them a booking in two weeks. Politely, Nichols explained that they needed money sooner than that. So Gordon gave them a second, temporary gig—starting right away, they could play his downtown club, the Village Vanguard, until the spot at the Blue Angel opened up.

The venues couldn’t have been more different. The Vanguard had been a mainstay of the West Village for almost twenty-five years, a casual watering hole for a young crowd of locals, beatniks, poets, potheads, and anyone else who liked jazz combos, blues singers, and cheap drinks. The acoustics were rough, and the chairs scraped noisily on the floor when anyone moved. The Blue Angel was dark, plush, and self-consciously swank, a long, narrow space with gray velour and pink rosettes covering the walls, thick carpeting, a well- dressed clientele crowded at small black tables, and, in the back room, a stage so tiny that the singer and actress Dorothy Loudon once said it was “like trying to perform on top of a cocktail napkin.” The Vanguard, which bore a close resemblance to the bars Nichols and May had played in Chicago, was a comfortable place for them to warm up. They started there in early October as the opening act for Mort Sahl, whose style of casually delivered topical humor— the equivalent of a live late-night monologue—had brought him a measure of success in the previous few years. Every night, Sahl would stroll out onstage, usually in a red V-neck sweater and with a folded newspaper under one arm, and riff on the day’s events. It wasn’t Nichols’s style, but he saw how effectively Sahl worked the turf; he packed the Vanguard every night, and thus guaranteed his two novice openers a big audience. They came up with a short set tailored to the small space—nothing that required props or a lot of physical action would work, but “Teenagers,” set in a parked car at   night, could be done with just two high stools on which they sat side by side. The radio-host-and-starlet sketch might also play well, or perhaps “Telephone,” a reliable routine they’d worked up with Nichols as a young man desperate to make a call from a pay phone and down to his last dime and May voicing a series of operators ranging from bored to extravagantly solicitous.

After “Teenagers” and maybe one more sketch (or not, depending on Sahl’s level of impatience), they would do what they’d done to impress Rollins: They would ask the audience for line suggestions— and for a particular literary style, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Clifford Odets—and, for their big finish, they would improvise a scene in that writer’s style. The laugh when they got to the last line, with the audience delighted to discover how they’d made their way there, was a perfect high on which to end. “The trick was, we had both read everything,” May says. “The toughest thing was if they gave us an easy one, because we hadn’t read the easy ones. But they would try to stump us, and the more they did that, the easier it got. Greek plays were easy. Ibsen was easy. Harold Robbins would have been hard, because we hadn’t read him.” The improv invariably showcased the two of them at their most relaxed and connected. Nichols would have to fight to keep from breaking character and cracking up, a habit he’d gotten into in Chicago, sometimes to get an audience on their side but more often because he just couldn’t help it. “This will sound simple-minded, but we both thought the same things were funny,” May says. “We found each other hilarious.” Downtown, they were an instant sensation—so instant that the audience on the second night already included repeat visitors. Sahl was in danger of being upstaged, and he knew it; in the second week of their Vanguard run, he stepped in a couple of times just as they were about to go on and canceled their set, telling them the crowd was already primed enough for the main attraction. They hurtled toward their opening at the Blue Angel with barely a moment to rearrange their lives. At the Vanguard, Nichols and May could wear trousers and turtlenecks, but when they left St. Louis, neither of them had taken along anything dressy enough for a Midtown nightclub. “Jack bought Mike a new shirt, and Jack’s wife took Elaine out and bought her a dress,” recalled Rollins’s partner, Charles Joffe.Both of them were trying to find apartments—May would soon be able to move both her mother and her daughter to New York to live with her, and Nichols was on the phone to his wife, trying to get her to tie up loose ends in Chicago and join him. Otherwise, they hadn’t touched base with anyone, a fact of which Nichols was reminded when the phone rang and the voice at the other end, with icy precision, said, “Hello, Michael. This is your mother speaking. Do you remember me?”

“I said, ‘Mom, can I call you right back?’” Nichols remembered. “And I called Elaine and said, ‘I have a new piece for tonight,’ and I told her the first line. She said, ‘Oh! Say no more!’ We did it that night. We had talked about it no more than that and the way we did it stayed forever. I told my mother it was Elaine’s mother, she told her mother it was my mother . . . it was very liberating!” The sketch, known as “Mother and Son,” was a six-minute phone conversation between Nichols, as a brilliant rocket scientist in the middle of a launch, and his emotional assassin of a mother. (“Arthur, I sat by that phone all day Friday and all day Friday night and all day Saturday and all day Sunday. Your father finally said to me, ‘Phyllis, eat something, you’ll faint.’ I said, ‘Harry, no. I don’t want my mouth to be full when my son calls.’”) It was a superb showcase for May, who made a feast out of lines like “I’m sorry I bothered you when you were so busy—believe me, I won’t be around to bother you much longer” and “[My doctor] said, ‘Mrs. White, I have been a doctor for thirty-five years and I have never heard of a son who’s too busy to call his mother.’ That’s what he said to me, Arthur, and that man is a doctor.”) 


The mother as underminer was not a new comedy invention, and there was a measure of Eisenhower-era misogyny in the notion that all women eventually emasculate their sons—Nichols’s character literally becomes a babbling toddler by the end. But the barbs were so well aimed and the passive-aggression so specifically and personally observed that it all felt as fresh to audience members as if Nichols and May had somehow unearthed their family secrets. With Nichols graciously teeing up one punch line after another for her, the scene became an instant staple of their act and one of their most frequently requested sketches.
For the Blue Angel they created a set list that included “Teenagers,” “Mother and Son,” “Disc Jockey” (the Jack Ego sketch), and “Pirandello” and ended with the audience-prompted improv. They gave their first performance in mid-October; they were
initially a late-night act, for those who didn’t mind staying up and staying out. Two weeks later, Rollins said, “they were the hottest thing in the city.”
As hyperbolic as that sounds, it wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Within days of Nichols and May’s Blue Angel opening, it became a badge of cultural cachet to say you saw them first, you saw them twice, you saw them in Chicago, you saw them downtown. On October 24, they got their first review, from the New York Journal- American’s Gene Knight. “A large crowd gathered on the sidewalk in front of 152 E 55th St. Something happen? Yes. This was the Blue Angel at midnight and Mike Nichols and Elaine May, sensational young comedy team, were about to go on. These people outside
were trying, more or less unsuccessfully, to get in. I was among the fortunate . . . Mike and Elaine certainly pack ’em in. Without any waste of time, this boy and girl went to work on their disk jockey bit. I’ve heard them do it before, but they stage sketches you enjoy seeing again and again . . . The lines (they write their own sophisticated stuff) are the cleverest heard at any club in town. The pace leads to laugh after laugh . . . There is nothing funnier in the niteries.” (Variety’s critic wasn’t as sure; he called them “hipsters’ hipsters” and warned, “in average . . . spots the act will have trouble finding its mark.”)
Gordon realized that he’d stumbled upon gold; he quickly signed Nichols and May to a six-month contract. By December they had landed in the pages of The New Yorker. “Taking shelter from the damp one recent night, I wandered into the Blue Angel and caught their act. I enjoyed it so much that I’ve been back a couple of times since,” Douglas Watt wrote in his Tables for Two column. “Mr. Nichols, a fair youth with an alert and friendly mien, and Miss May carry on little dialogues . . . with something of the same delightful
interplay characteristic of that splendid vaudeville team the Lunts; the bantering tone, the repeated phrases, the artful covering of each other’s lines—all these devices are present, and well-mastered.” Watt raised a skeptical eyebrow at the improv sketch, remarking, “I suspect . . . that they have situations prepared for these invited little emergencies, but I still couldn’t help being impressed by the ease with which they slipped into and out of them. On one of my visits they took off on Euripides (with no props at all), and I’m sure that the Greek theatre was never more fun.”