One of Nichols’s oft-repeated phrases was “Life isn’t everything,” but then what was beyond life? Everything else, or some relevant nothing? As his usual stage manager, Peter Lawrence, expresses it: “There was always Igor Peschkowsky in Mike. There was always that German Jewish boy who arrives in America looking like a boiled egg.” (He had a condition that caused him to lose all his hair, including eyebrows and eyelashes.) His English consisted of just “I do not speak English” and “Please do not kiss me.” Lawrence believes this to be “apocryphal, but he claimed it was true.” He became ambidextrously a film and stage director of genius, an achievement that few directors can claim, especially if you throw in television.

Image "Life isn't everything. Mike Nichols, as remembered by 150 of his closest friends."

Ash Carter, a writer and editor, and Sam Kashner, the author or co-author of several books, have skillfully handled things in 14 chapters and a coda. They have drawn on 150 respondents, friendly and mostly jovial, along with a good many quotations from Nichols himself. I am especially fond of two simple remarks. One when Richard Burton asked Mike to look after Elizabeth Taylor in Rome. Replied Nichols, “If it’ll help.” The beauty of this is the number of ways it can be taken. The choreographer Casey Nicholaw recalls the other, Mike’s comment to an actor during rehearsal: “That was wonderful, now do it as you.”

“Life Isn’t Everything” covers the brilliant student days at the University of Chicago, in the city where contemporary improv was born. Nichols teamed up with Elaine May, and this soon-to-be-celebrated duo performed at a number of Chicago nightclubs and theaters. His fame would grow over the years, exponentially. Somebody once wrote a letter addressed merely to “Mike Nichols, Famous American Director,” and it got to him. He could make everyone in a room feel smarter and wittier; he had, as Renata Adler notes, “presence.” And he had “that incredible capacity for friendship that makes you think you’re absolutely unique,” Anjelica Huston recalls.

After his first film, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1966 (with Taylor and Burton), Nichols directed “The Graduate.” Dustin Hoffman says, “I was dubbed a perfectionist for years and years, and all I could think was, I learned from Mike Nichols.” Altogether, the pages about “The Graduate” constitute some of the best writing about Hollywood and could make, by themselves, a devastating satire. In Tom Hanks’s words, “The Graduate” was “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of disaffected youth.” On the set of his next major movie, “Catch-22,” a grotesque contest ensued as to who was the director, Nichols or one of his stars, Orson Welles.

In the case of “Carnal Knowledge,” Jules Feiffer, who wrote the screenplay, states that “it was always about the work and never about his ego, never about his sense of importance.” This could be said about all of Nichols’s films, the sort of thing that makes Art Garfunkel say, “He has been a Santa Claus in my life.” The British playwright David Hare asserts: “In my opinion, ‘Carnal Knowledge’ is Mike’s masterpiece. I think it’s one of the great American movies.” Rita Moreno, who was in it, speaks of Nichols, not without covert admiration, as having had “an icy kind of heart.”