MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST

A biography of an iconic entertainer.

Courogen makes an engaging book debut with an appreciative biography of comedian, director, playwright, and actor Elaine May (b. 1932), as famous for her prickly personality as for her brilliant, sardonic wit. Drawing on abundant published material and interviews, the author chronicles May’s roller-coaster career. The daughter of peripatetic entertainers, by the time she was 10, she had been enrolled in more than 50 schools. She left school for good when she was 14, married when she was 16, and by the next year had a baby. Leaving her daughter with her mother, in 1952, she hitchhiked to Chicago, where she met Mike Nichols. “Mike and Elaine,” Courogen writes, “found their possibilities in a shared interest in people’s pretentious natures (including their own), a mutual fascination with betrayal, and above all else, an unending love for language.” The two created a nightclub act that catapulted them to fame on TV and Broadway, as well as “a blur of nonstop gigs.” But in 1961, Elaine, bored and restless, quit. While Nichols went on to become an award-winning director, May’s career sank for years before it revived. Courogen recounts in detail her reincarnation as a director, actor, and, notably, script doctor, “someone who could make your project better, often at the eleventh hour.” By the mid-1980s, “she had gone from someone who was practically unhireable to someone who was not only constantly booked and busy, but able to turn down work left and right, agreeing only to scripts she found truly interesting or exciting.” Though Courogen thoroughly documents May’s career, her inner life remains elusive; as someone who knew May commented, she’s “wickedly smart, wickedly funny, wickedly clever. But you could never get to the center of her.”

A sympathetic yet somewhat incomplete portrayal of a unique talent.