When Mike Nichols put his name to something, lots of folks would show up to see what it was about.
Mike knew all about performing. He had been on the stage as an improviser and actor for years. When he was starting out, his Broadway show with Elaine May was a big hit. After that, he proved that he was very skilled at directing for stage and film. Everybody knew Mike Nichols’s name. And before Mike Nichols chose me, very few people knew my name. So, count me lucky from the get-go.
About a week or so before my show opened, I came in to rehearse and saw a small white-haired man and his tiny well-dressed wife sitting with Mike. They looked like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.
Mike didn’t introduce me like he usually did. He only said, “Okay, let’s get through some of the pieces you want to hit. Let me take a look.”
So, I just went on doing my thing on stage. I didn’t give it much thought. The couple was laughing and having a good time.
Then opening night rolled around. My mom went with me to my dressing room, and it was completely full with tons of crazy stuff—opening night presents, lots of flower arrangements, and notes on every countertop like you see in the movies.
My mother started reading the cards on the flower arrangements. Famous people I had never met had sent me their “break a leg” wishes. It was amazing.
“These flowers are from Diana Ross,” my mother said, pointing out a big vase of roses.
I said, “I don’t know Diana Ross, but that’s really great.”
“Well, she knows who you are.”
I was overwhelmed by the support.
Against the wall of my dressing room were two wrapped packages, leaning up against the wall.
I opened the first one: a framed Hirschfeld drawing of me in poses of each of my characters. The little Santa Claus man at rehearsal that day had been Al Hirschfeld, who was there to draw my caricature. If you know about him, he began to hide his daughter’s name, Nina, in his drawings after she was born in 1945. Next to his signature he would write the number of times he had hidden her name in his art. In mine he put Nina’s name forty times, the most of any drawing he had ever done. I was blown away.
The second wrapped present was a huge surprise. It was from Mike and my mother. At some point during rehearsal, Mike and I had talked about the actor Sam Waterston, who starred in the stage version of Hamlet in New York. I had seen him in various productions when I was younger, and I told Mike what a great actor he is and that I loved watching him do his thing. I am a big admirer of Sam’s incredible talent.
I pulled the paper away from the gift to find a giant framed poster of Sam Waterston as Hamlet, signed by Sam to me.
Mike understood me. He understood my mom a lot. I don’t know why. He just did.
After the show was an opening night party. I wasn’t familiar with the traditions on Broadway, and, I have to say, it was something to be feted by all those well-known people. Jack Nicholson, Calvin Klein, and Liza Minnelli attended.
At one point Paul Simon grabbed my mom and said, “You have to make sure she enjoys this. When it all happened for Artie and me, we didn’t know we were supposed to enjoy it. We didn’t. I hope she understands that, regardless of what people say to her, she’s got to enjoy it now because this part only happens once.”
My mom passed the message along to me right away. I heard it. I enjoyed myself and soaked it all in.
Ruth Gordon and her husband, Garson Kanin, came to see my show. I have been a big fan of both since I was a kid. I always knew who they were. They said, “You have to let us take you to lunch.”
I thought, Hell yeah. I’m gonna let Minnie Castevet from Rosemary’s Baby, one of the best horror films of all time, take me to lunch. Her husband had written Born Yesterday, which my mom and I had watched whenever it was on TV. Yeah, I’m definitely going to lunch with them.
After that opening night and for the whole run of the 156 shows, my mother and I and almost any celebrity you can name would often go to lunch or dinner somewhere. Almost better to me than getting to meet these famous folks myself was seeing my mother get to meet them. Watching her share a meal with these famous actors, performers, and directors she had watched for years was amazing. For me, whatever my mom wanted to do, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted better things for her than for me. I wanted to make sure that whatever it was, she was going to be part of it. I wanted her to have great times for all the Coney Island days and for taking us to see the Rockettes, the Ice Capades, the circus, the museums, the Beatles, and all the other days she made magnificence happen. For all the ways she had enriched my childhood and my imagination, I wanted this as a way to thank her.
Just like the publicist had told me, folks started to recognize me on the street. Sometimes, that worked out really well. Often the traffic in Manhattan to the Broadway district was really thick, and even catching a cab to get to the theater and get ready on time could be risky. Quite a few times, one of the horse-drawn carriage drivers would recognize me and pick up my mom and me on their way to Central Park and drop us at the theater.
Everything started to move forward pretty fast. Sandy Gallin, a huge entertainment manager, took me on as a client. I got an agent. A whole new time in my life was opening up.
Because of Mike Nichols, I got the attention of Steven Spielberg. He was going to direct the movie adaptation of The Color Purple, and he wanted me to audition for the lead role of Celie. That started up a long audition process that took almost a year. The cast was huge, and he had a lot to do, figuring out what it would all look like. At that time, I didn’t know that he was pretty set on me playing Celie.
I knew I wouldn’t be going back to being onstage with the Blake Street Hawkeyes, and Dave knew it, too. Even though he was the first one to say “go for it” when I got the Broadway offer, he didn’t want to be on standby, waiting to see what would happen between us. He told me he’d take care of Alex until I could figure it out, but he was ready to move on and not have the responsibility.
I had saved up a lot of my Broadway money, and I really wanted to keep my mom around me. She was my best check-in. She kept it all real for me. I also needed help looking after Alex. Mom was still teaching preschool and was living back in our apartment in the projects. I didn’t know what she would want to do. She had worked hard to get her master’s degree, and I didn’t know if she would want to leave her place in Head Start behind. But I thought I’d ask.
I called her from California with my proposition. “Ma, would you ever consider coming to California? I’m going back and forth to LA and New York to audition, and Alex is in school, so I need some help.”
She didn’t hesitate for long. “Yes. When do you want me there?”
“I got to tell you, Ma. It may be a while you’ll be here.”
“I don’t have a problem with that.”
“Great. Great. I can buy you a plane ticket as soon as you can come,” I told her.
I went to pick her up at the airport after a few weeks had gone by, and she walked off the plane carrying two brown shopping bags.
“What’s in the bags?” I asked her.
“Everything I wanted to take.”
“So, where are your suitcases?”
“This is it,” she said. “This much is what I brought.”
“But did you close up the apartment? What will happen with that?”
She stopped walking and faced me. “Listen. I left everything. I took what I wanted. I dropped the house key into the incinerator, and I left.”
“Wait! You did what?”
She repeated, “I dropped the key into the incinerator and left for the airport.”
I still couldn’t grasp it. “Well, what about all the stuff still in the house? What about your books, the Beatles albums, and everything else?”
“I’m looking at this as a fresh start,” she told me. “There’s no point in bringing all that with me. Besides, you didn’t ever say that I should save you the albums or anything in that apartment, did you?”
She was right about that, so I couldn’t say more. “Okay, I get it. But . . . what about stuff like our birth certificates?”
Ma got in the front seat of my Volkswagen Bug. “You can always get another one.”
I still couldn’t quite understand what she was telling me. “Ma, what happened to—”
She stopped me in the middle. “Caryn, I don’t know what you want me to say. I brought what I wanted, and I didn’t want to bring the rest. I can get what I need here in California. I didn’t want to bring that old life into this new one.”
That was it. That’s all there was to be said about it. She never returned to the projects, and I have no idea where anything from our old apartment went. I’m sure somebody scored some cash on those first-run Beatles albums. I keep waiting for my birth certificate to pop up in a tabloid magazine one day, but it never has.
Years and years later, after she had told me the secret about her memory loss after Bellevue, it made sense. The move to California was probably the first time she had felt safe, like nobody was going to show up and take her back to Bellevue. I got it. She wanted to be free. It became clear to me.
I knew I had a goal. From then on, I felt like my life’s calling was to take the load off my mom, to give her a good time. She had carried it long enough.
My mother was the first person I told when I was offered the part of Celie, months before the cast was public.
“So, you’re going to be in a Steven Spielberg movie,” my mother said. And then we did a jig in celebration.
I was going to be the only major cast member who had never been in a film or a TV show before. Even though I wanted the part, I felt the pressure of Spielberg taking a risk on me.
After I got the final word, I said to Steven, “What if I suck?”
He said, “You’ve sucked before, haven’t you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Okay, you’ll just suck again. I’ll do my best to keep that from happening. You’ve sucked before, but you didn’t suck every day, right?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“So, there might be times when you suck—it’s true for everybody. But I still believe you can and should play this part.”
It took me a while to get used to filming instead of theater. I didn’t know that films are not shot in the order of how the story goes, the way a play happens. It’s too expensive. So they have to film all the scenes that take place in a certain location all together. Like every scene inside the speakeasy was shot, and then we’d move on to a different location.
I was not used to not having a live audience and having to do repeated takes of the same scene so the cameras could catch it from every angle.
Early in the shooting, I asked Steven, “How do you know if somebody’s laughing? How do you know if you got it without the audience reacting to you?”
He called me over to stand next to him in front of the camera. He pointed into the lens. “Look in there. That’s where all those people are. Right down there. You won’t be able to hear them. Because if you could hear them, we wouldn’t be able to do the takes. So, you have to know that they are laughing or crying silently.”
The other thing he told me was, “If you’re really present in the scene, you can see and feel it in your crew. The crew knows more about good acting and making movies than you will ever know, so treat them like platinum.”
He taught me to respect what the crew needed from me, to trust them. If they say they need something from you, go with it. If you treat your crew poorly, it’s not going to go well for you. I thank God that Steven trained me that way from the very beginning. My career work ethic has always been this: take care of the crew.
I would call my mom every day at the end of filming, and we’d laugh and talk, and I’d tell her the secrets of filmmaking that no one else sees when they’re watching a movie.
“Ma, there’s going to be a scene where I’m running to my sister in a field full of sunflowers. Well, there really isn’t a field. They brought in hundreds of buckets full of sunflower plants and lined them all up to look like a field.”
She loved hearing about it all.
“How do they make those rooms look so full of cigarette and cigar smoke?” she asked me.
“It’s a machine with dry ice and some ingredient that makes smoke, and they blow that across the set before shooting the scene.”
Every day I’d call her and give her some new insight, except when I tried to tell her how they made it look like someone was bleeding.
“No, that can’t be fake. I’m going to still believe it’s real blood,” Ma said.
When I got my first Oscar nomination for The Color Purple, I didn’t know how I felt about it. I knew I was good in the movie and that it was worthy of a nomination, but I didn’t expect one.
The day it was announced, my mother and I laughed and giggled all morning because we were both Oscars fanatics. We had never missed watching one. As a kid, I had written hundreds of acceptance speeches for when I won my own Oscar. But when it really happened, I thought, How will I actually get up and give a speech if I do win?
People kept calling me all day, telling me I was going to win.
I said to my mother, “This is all just very odd. I don’t know how to feel about any of this.”
And she said, “Well, the first thing you should remind yourself of is that you may not win. I know people are already saying to you that you’re gonna get it. That may not happen. You may not. So you need to just be glad you got here, the first time out.”
I knew she was right. I was looking at the other women up for Best Actress: Anne Bancroft, Jessica Lange, Meryl Streep, and Geraldine Page, all my favorites, every single one of them.
Geraldine Page and her husband, Rip Torn, lived in Chelsea when I was kid, and we would see them out and about in the neighborhood. Everybody knew who they were because they did Broadway shows. I never had the money to see her when I was a kid, but I’d read about her shows in the newspaper. I also knew she had been nominated for an Oscar many times and had never won one. To me, she is one of those be-all and end-all actors. Same with Anne Bancroft. They were both very New York, but they also were in many films. That’s how I knew their acting work. I was like, Oh, my God, here I am in their company.
After the nominations were announced, some people made little digs aimed at me. People in the press were trying to make me feel bad because I was nominated for my very first movie, with a “how dare you” attitude. Then, I began thinking, Fuck you. I was nominated because they thought I was good enough. And I don’t care what any of you boneheads say.
So, the night arrived, and I was sitting in a gown in the audience of the Academy Awards. I saw Jack Nicholson, Don Ameche, Anjelica Houston, and Harrison Ford all sitting close by. I was thinking about how Ma would have liked seeing Harrison Ford in person. She was a big fan of his. She called Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise “journeyman actors.” They rarely get nominated, but they are the actors the whole movie depends on. Those were always her favorites, those unsung hardworking actors that carry the whole plotline.
When my category came up, the presenter was F. Murray Abraham, who had won an Oscar the year before for playing Salieri in Amadeus. He read the names of each of the nominees, and then he opened the envelope and paused. He said how he had revered the winner for decades. I knew it was Geraldine Page for her performance in A Trip to Bountiful. And I was thinking, You’re not the only one who feels that way about her.
He announced Geraldine’s name. I was applauding like crazy. As she was walking to the stage, the actor sitting next to me said, “Why did you applaud so much when she beat you?”
I said, “What do you mean? That’s Geraldine Page. You know, she’s Geraldine Page.” I gave a quick list of everything she had been in. This was her win, and in a way mine too because I was also a New York actor. I was thinking, She’s a New York actor. I’m a New York actor. And that was good enough for me.
The next year she passed away. So, yeah, I was happy it happened for her that year.
Even though I didn’t win, between doing the Broadway show with Mike Nichols and The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg, I knew I had something. I thought I was talented. I will tell you that people don’t want you to get too excited about yourself. Between growing up with my mother telling me that I could do whatever I wanted to do, and Mike Nichols and Steven Spielberg reiterating that to me with their belief, I felt like I could walk up to people, look them in the eye, and say, “Yeah, I can do that part.”
They walked me in the door. They said, “We’re vouching for her. We’re walking her in because she has talent.” I got my confidence because they knew what I was capable of doing. I would call Mike if I was in doubt about what I could do—he always had me in his sights. I stopped listening to other people who gave me a list of reasons why I couldn’t do certain roles. I knew those people didn’t know anything about me or what I might be capable of. Even after Broadway and my first feature film, I still wanted the opportunity to do what I believed I could do.
About two weeks before Mike Nichols passed away, Cynthia Nixon called me to say Mike wanted her and me and Christine Baranski to meet him for lunch. We all had a two-hour lunch. We laughed and told stories and listened to Mike tell stories. I knew that this man’s effect on me and my luck with him coming to my show all those years ago put me in wondrous company. It seemed like Mike was thinner and didn’t have the energy he once had. We all figured he was eighty-three now, so none of us mentioned it to each other. I didn’t know it would be my last time seeing him. None of us did.
When he died of a heart attack in November 2014, I had just dealt with my brother’s death in May. The people I loved the most in the world just seemed to keep leaving . . . were no longer in the world.
I was supposed to talk about the loss of Mike on The View the next day, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop crying long enough to say anything. Many of us gathered at his home, and Mary-Louise Parker and I were bartering with God. We wanted Mike back—was there anyone we could offer God instead? Had we not been so crushed, I bet we could have figured something out.
Mike Nichols’s friendship and belief in me still sustain me.