Once upon a time, Mike Nichols married Chicago singer Patricia Scot. Here’s their story.
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“Mike Nichols: A Life,” a new biography by Mark Harris due out Tuesday, reveals a great deal about the Grammy-, Tony-, Oscar- and Emmy-winning director who got his start in Chicago in the 1950s. Nichols joined The Compass Players here and discovered in fellow performer Elaine May a comic soul mate for the ages.
Dozens of real-life characters, illustrating so many aspects of Nichols’s astounding show-business life, run through Harris’s book, which is the subject of a Tribune Sunday A&E story. In this column, let’s focus on just one of those characters: Nichols’s first wife, Patricia Scot.
Scot is an established figure of mid- and late-1950s Chicago television, among other things. She and vocalist Len Dressler provided the nightly musical numbers on the 15-minute WBBM-TV Channel 2 variety show “In Town Tonight,” sponsored by Old Gold cigarettes. Jim Conway, longtime Chicago broadcaster and talk-show host, showcased a wild range of performers — everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. to the Swiss novelty act The Trio Schmid — who happened to be playing one of the downtown Chicago nightclubs on any given night.
Scot, now Patricia Scot Yorton, is 89, lives in Winter Haven, Fla., with her fourth husband, trumpeter Jack Yorton. Conversationally, she’s a gem with a sharp memory of her Chicago years.
Scot met Nichols in 1955. She was already well-established on “In Town Tonight,” her face on billboards everywhere. In one clip posted on YouTube, she glides through Cole Porter’s “You’re Sensational” backed by the 22-piece Caesar Petrillo Orchestra. In those years, she was making good money and living in a lakeside apartment at 6900 S. Lake Shore Drive, near where University of Chicago graduate Nichols performed at various venues with The Compass Players. Nichols and Scot were together for five years, married for three of those years, not easily or happily. She provides a key voice for Nichols’s Chicago years in “Mike Nichols: A Life.”
Talking to her is like listening to a real-life embodiment of Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” from “Follies,” putting all the good times and tough times in mellow perspective. I spent an hour with her by phone, after she relocated to a quieter room. “Sorry,” she said, brightly. “We’re watching old reruns of ‘JAG.’”
Excerpts from our conversation:
“One night Joe Goldberg, my dear friend and my producer at ‘In Town Tonight,’ said to me: ‘Have you heard of these Compass Players?’ We should go catch them.’ Boy, I was just flabbergasted. Improvising, Mike and Elaine and the others were doing with acting what singers do with music. ... Mike was like the sun in your eyes. You didn’t see anybody else but him. After the show every night I high-tailed it down to Hyde Park to see them again.”
The former Miss Milwaukee was, as she says now, “on TV every night. I was kind of a star then, I guess you’d say.” (A 1955 Tribune columnist called her “a looker with a personality voice” offering “consistently good singing.”) “Finally, I was invited to go in the back room with them, where they’d make up the skits based on suggestions from the audience. You know: ‘Two teenagers in the back seat of a car.’ Or ‘Football comes to the University of Chicago.’ Shelley Berman was in the company by that time, I remember, and he was squatting down as the center about to hike the ball through his legs to Mike, who was the quarterback. The director backstage told him, ‘OK, Mike, bend over and spread your legs, and …’ And Mike, who could be officious, I guess you could say, said, ‘Surely not!’ He was just so funny.”
[From Hyde Park to ‘The Graduate’ and beyond: Terrific new Mike Nichols biography illuminates the path of a Chicago-bred improv master]
Scot calls herself “a middle-class girl from Milwaukee. When I met Mike I didn’t have that higher level of education, or much sophistication. I met quite a few nice young men who seemed to take it upon themselves to teach me the finer things in life. Very, very, very nice people who took me under their wing to help me. Which I appreciated! Let me tell you, I have lived in mansions, I have lived in $8-a-week rooms when I was gigging around Chicago before ‘In Town Tonight.’ I’ve been up and down and up and down. Money comes. Money goes. Money does not impress me. Brains impress me. But it was a mistake for Mike and I to marry. We really didn’t have anything in common. I was just awed by his intelligence and his wit.”
Their honeymoon, in New York and then in a rural Massachusetts summer resort, is recounted discreetly but painfully in “Mike Nichols: A Life.” “I’ve had three mothers-in-law. I’m on my fourth marriage. I’ll tell you, I got good lessons in how not to be a mother-in-law from all three of them. Jesus, Mike’s mother was awful to me. And can you imagine going on your honeymoon with your mother-in-law in the next room?”
They divorced in 1960, after a long, chilly series of long distances whether they were in the same city or not. With Scot in Chicago, in their Old Town apartment, Nichols joined the St. Louis Compass Players for a time. “I’d fly down to St. Louis on a Saturday and fly back Sunday night or Monday morning, and make a beeline to my psychotherapist. By the time Mike went to St. Louis, I was a distant memory of the past to him. He probably saw, clearly, what a horrible mistake he’d made. My mistake, too. I said ‘I do,’ and I thought ‘I will’ and ‘I must.’ That’s the way I was brought up.”
Nichols and May decamped to New York, triumphantly, with Scot joining her husband there for a time.
She got back in touch by mail in the last years of Nichols’ life, Scot says. One day, “8 o’clock in the morning, right here in this house, the phone rang, I picked it up, and I heard: ‘Pat? Nichols here!’ And I said: ‘Oh! Hi!’ There I am, sitting in my robe in my kitchen talking to Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer. The night before, his daughter Daisy, I think it was, had asked him about his life in Chicago, and about me, I guess.”
One time, Scot says, Nichols wrote her “just to say how he appreciated how good I was to him. And I was. I mean, I bought him his teeth! I paid for his dentist bills. No big deal. If you’re with someone, you take care of him. I was making money at the time. I had money, and he was the poor struggling actor.”
You get older, she says, “and you not only forgive yourself but you forgive other people. We were good to each other at the end of his life. ‘Happy birthday, old friend’ — that’s what I wrote to him on his 83rd birthday. Two weeks later, he died. It was nice to end up being kind to each other. Know what I mean? It’s nicer that way.”
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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