Elaine May is one of the key architects of American comedy; an alumna of the influential Kennedy-era underground scene in Chicago that gave us the O.G. “Saturday Night Live” cast and film director Mike Nichols.
Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon have name-checked May as a comedy hero. And yet, despite seven decades as a filmmaker, actor and screenwriter whose movies are entrenched in the Hollywood canon, May is that rarity: a film legend who has opted out of public life. We know the work, but not the creator.
The director of the classic 1972 comedy “The Heartbreak Kid,” with writing credits on Warren Beatty’s films “Heaven Can Wait” and “Reds” as well as Nichols’ “Primary Colors” and “The Birdcage,” May has no need to explain herself or her art; you won’t find TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz gently coaxing chirpy anecdotes from May any time soon. She is not, in short, a prime candidate for a full-dress biography, yet somehow Carrie Courogen has pulled it off. Courogen’s “Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius” is a minor miracle.
Despite the big shrug off by her subject, who doesn’t do interviews, Courogen has produced the definitive book about May’s life and career. This, despite getting nothing from her subject save for breadcrumb trails that went cold, leads that dissolved into thin air. It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.
Courogen, a journalist and visual content director based in New York, reached.
