It can be said with certainty about Elaine May: a few weeks ago she received the honorary Oscar for her life's work, so to speak, behind closed doors.

She wrote screenplays for films that a lot of people still know today, like Tootsie, Heaven Can Wait or Primary Colors, and worked with men who could say the same about Otto Preminger, Herbert Ross, Warren Beatty or Woody Allen.

In the 1950s, together with Mike Nichols, she formed one of the craziest comedy duos on American stages, in Chicago and on Broadway, some of which can now be seen on YouTube.

Verena Lueken

Freelance writer for the feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

She's acted in a good handful of motion pictures and directed four between 1971 and 1987 - the long gap between the first three and the last has to do with her stubbornness that made her pass "difficult" and that it wasn't more with the smashing failure of her last, Ishtar, which ended her career as a director (and left Columbia so bad that parent company Coca-Cola decided to sell the studio to Sony).

It should have an entry in every book on American film (at least) from the 1970s, but most of the time it doesn't.

She has not written an autobiography.

No one else has written a biography about her either.

Grew up on the stages of Yiddish theaters

So it cannot be confirmed with certainty whether what is also claimed is true: that Elaine May more or less grew up on the stages where her parents performed in Yiddish theaters and she mostly played the role of the little boy Billy;

that she had attended fifty different schools before she turned ten;

and that in 1976, when she was making her third film as director ("Mickey and Nicky") with Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, she kept the camera rolling long after they had left the set.

"Maybe they'll come back," she reportedly said.

When the camera was rolling, back then, loaded with celluloid film, every meter cost money, and Elaine May (or so the Paramount studio saw it and ensured that she got a spot on Hollywood's unofficial blacklist) wasted thousands.

In order to protect herself against editing interventions by the studio, she is said to have repeatedly hidden rolls of her currently finished film under her bed.

Whether that is true, and whether anything that is said or written about her is true, she has rarely confirmed and never denied.

Elaine May is not a woman to go public with, although she does speak publicly, at least Hollywood publicly, in honor of the men she has worked with.

Elaine May is one of the handful of women who were able to make films in Hollywood in the 1970s and were largely in control.

Her first film as a director, A New Leaf, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year.

That was the reason for a little attention for this film, which came to the cinema in Germany under the stupid title "No one kills as badly as I do" and is probably largely forgotten here.

Just stay in control!

That was about to change, although the film in its current form so displeased Elaine May that she threatened to withdraw her name.

In this case, "extensive control" means on the one hand: written and directed by Elaine May, who also plays the female lead and should be responsible for the final cut.

That's what the contract said.

On the other hand, "largely" does not mean to a large extent that Paramount would have complied with this point in the contract.

The studio edited the film, which was then released under her name.

Her version would have been twice as long and, one can assume, would have been a lot darker, if certainly no less funny.

Walter Matthau plays a bankrupt bon vivant whose butler advises him to marry rich to maintain his lifestyle.

“Get married?” Matthau asks.

"You mean: a woman?" This woman plays Elaine May in the role of a super-rich clumsy botanist with a special interest in ferns.

The way the two get together and Matthau doesn't kill her after all is, firstly, the best screwball comedy full of exuberant playfulness in the lineage of the 1930s and secondly, unmistakably Elaine May in the best mood for improvisation - the animosity between men and women and the devaluation of the interests of these botanists, for example to nerdy weirdness are among May's favorite comedic themes.

Here, as her own leading lady, she has transformed into a truly whimsical creature hanging far above a cliff on her honeymoon in search of a special fern, while Matthau reads a poison-mixing handbook in the foreground.

Is there a better definition of character than what Dustin Hoffman tries to console in "Ishtar" for yet another failure: "You'd rather have nothing than settle for less"?

Elaine May, who thought of that, would probably sign that.

It's safe to say that she turns ninety today.