There’s a profile on Mike Nichols in the NY Times, because of an upcoming MOMA retrospective of his films, which include:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Graduate
Catch-22
Carnal Knowledge
Silkwood
The Birdcage
Charlie Wilson’s War

Now I’m old enough to have known Nichols first via his comedy albums, when he was part of a duo with Elaine May (and those albums still hold up well).

Anyway, I’m reading the profile and I get to this bit ….

He wakes up every morning in his Fifth Avenue apartment, collects himself and, wearing a wig and paste-on eyebrows, plays a character called Mike Nichols.

He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, the son of a White Russian doctor who emigrated to Berlin after the Russian revolution, and he arrived in New York in 1939, at the age of 7, permanently hairless (a reaction to whooping cough vaccine) and with almost no English

And I thought maybe he was putting the writer on. I never came across any mention of this before and there is no mention of it in his Wikipedia entry, but Google turned up a bio on a blog from several years ago that would seem to confirm this.

But then here comes the bit that stopped me in my tracks.

“I’ll tell you the most extreme example of immigrant’s ear in all of Western civilization. My grandfather, Gustav Landauer, was quite a well-known writer in Germany. He was also very political, and he was part of the two-week provisional Weimar government after the kaiser fell. When the government fell, he was taken to the police station and beaten to death. His best friend, who was also in the government, escaped, made his way to Sante Fe, changed his name to B. Traven and wrote ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.’ That’s the ur-immigrant story.”

I read several of the books attributed to B. Traven many years ago and, like so many others, marveled at how he managed to hide his identity for his entire life. There’s the tale of his agent, who showed up for the filming of Sierra Madre, and how John Huston was convinced the agent was really him. I’m also relatively sure that the writer in Bolano’s 2666 is based on Traven, or rather the mystery of Traven. Mike Nichols knows who B. Traven was? And Charles McGrath, the writer of the NY Times profile, doesn’t follow up on this?

Or is it just a put-on?

“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.”

Hongkie Town
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