The aim of biographer and essayist John Lahr is to 'honour the essential being' of the artists who are generous enough to accept his scrutiny, he tells Belinda McKeon
Like all the profiles of actors, singers, comedians, and other dealers in the business of dreams - the entertainment industry - which John Lahr has penned for the New Yorker in the past 12 years, his 2000 portrait of veteran director Mike Nichols, whose films include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, took the guts of four months to create.
Four months of shadowing the then 68-year-old, of watching, questioning and simply being with Nichols in the many places he found himself: a showbiz gala held in his honour at the Lincoln Centre; a cramped trailer on a movie set in Culver; a Midtown editing suite; his Fifth Avenue apartment with a library overlooking the Met. Of talking to his close friends, and to those he had worked with; people who merited (and have, in some cases, received) their own profile, people such as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sontag, Steven Spielberg. The Nichols piece, headed "Making it Real" - collected that same year, with 14 other New Yorker profiles, in Lahr's book, Show and Tell - would be characteristically compelling, an eloquent study of the psychological and social backdrop to the art.
As ever, Lahr shaded himself out of the the picture as it emerged; though events are observed through his eyes, feelings confided to his ears, the presence is that of Nichols, professionally wry and privately wary. Yet at its core is a deep sense of absence, and in its grip the empathy which Lahr always manages to achieve with his subjects climbs to a poignant pitch. The absence was that of Nichols's father, Paul, a Russian Jew who had brought his sons to New York before their mother was well enough to join them, and who had handed them over to an English family because he was unable to care for them himself:
"Even afterwards, when the family was reunited, said Nichols, Paul was a distant father. But I loved him anyway. One of the things I regretted for a long time was that he died before he could see that he would be proud of me."
The profile records how, at the end of their time together, as Nichols expressed his satisfaction with the way the long conversation had gone, Lahr turned to him and said something which, he says now, "was like touching the middle of his heart - I could see him, he just sucked in".
"I do well," he told Nichols, "with the fundamentally inconsolable."
If it was a comment which tapped into the source of Nichols's art, however, it told much, too, of the story of Lahr's own journey as a writer: as senior drama critic with the New Yorker, as author of several novels and screenplays, as successful playwright and acclaimed biographer of Kenneth Tynan, Joe Orton - and of his father, Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion of Victor Fleming's 1939 The Wizard of Oz. Because it was with the first inconsolable artist in his life, his father - whom he describes as "a very absent presence . . . a sort of comical ghost in the house" - that Lahr's journey began.
The 1969 biography, Notes on a Cowardly Lion, was, he says, "a way of me getting to know him really, and making a connection. You couldn't really connect with him by talking about anything but himself. So I did something for him, and he sort of gave me my leg-up, my start. Because it made my name, that book".
His "name", his status as a widely known and highly acclaimed writer, is something of which Lahr is aware, in an unabashed way.
"I connect with about a million people a week," he says of his New Yorker essays and reviews. Neither is he shy of mentioning the fact that most of his 18 books are still in print, nor of the fact that the Broadway show he created with the actor Elaine Stritch, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, was a huge success, garnering an Olivier nomination and a Tony Award. His sense of self, and of the worth of the work he does, is strikingly sure. "What I am trying to do," he says of the personalities he profiles, "is to honour their essential being, if I can get that. And no-one can ever get that, but if I can approach it, that's the aim. So they know that what you're trying to do is somehow see them - and you know, in your life, how many people see you? How many people see me? Not many. And the ones that do, or who want to, you're grateful to."
What he wants to do with his work, Lahr says, is to redress the balance between mere attention and genuine interpretation, which has been truly lost in the American media. "I feel that the contribution of theatricals to American culture is immense," he says. "There's an awful lot of press about these people, but not a lot of interpretation."
The stuff of celebrity magazines and tabloid newspapers is, he says, "irrelevant to artfulness and to a discussion of the craft and the accomplishment. That's my interest. Not J-Lo's cleave and that kind of crap".
It's his sense of a duty to really "see" which guards Lahr's assurance from becoming mere arrogance. The public's attitude towards the type of people he has written about since his first column - for the Village Voice in the late 1960s - has changed drastically in the last three decades, to the point, he believes, where it can pose a real threat to the career of talented individuals.
"Marlon Brando would be a perfect example," he says. "Brando was completely confounded, and, I think, ultimately destroyed by [celebrity]. Because there was no correlation between a payment and quality."
Reading Lahr's account of his father, a man who sparkled on set, who was adored by millions as the fantastic beast of the yellow brick road, but who at home with his family became one of Hollywood's wounded animals, silent and depressed, it's not difficult to understand where the impulse to understand celebrity, and to communicate that understanding to others, stems from. He was a man, Lahr writes in Show and Tell, who "never collaborated", never "reached out" to his family; his children watched his incarnation on-screen as he sighed and grimaced behind them, unsatisfied with his performance.
Now, when Lahr talks about the empathy he works to attain with his subjects, about the connection which should eventually be made, he goes so far to describe it as "a form of love". He will write to his subjects, he says, "before I interview them, that it's not worth my time or theirs if they're not going to collaborate. It is just not worth it. Because there have been a couple I have done - and I don't have to tell you that these people can be haughty and difficult at times - where someone will say: 'I'll only give you an hour.' "
Which is impossible, given that even four months frequently feels like too little - he's currently working on a profile of director and actor Steve Buscemi, "king of the independents", who has made 71 movies.
"How am I ever going to see 71 movies?" he asks. But he strives to get as close as he can, and only in one instance, he says, has he really disliked a subject.
"That was Sharon Stone, and I should have bailed, but Tina [Brown, then New Yorker editor] wanted me to write it, so I did," he says.
Overcoming a personal feeling of dislike to achieve something like objectivity is a skill Lahr has had to develop in his time as a drama critic. He speaks with venom about the tendency of some American critics to take an axe to the productions they are reviewing.
"It couldn't be easier," he says. "And the audience loves it, it's like bear-baiting. I always interpret that as a sort of anorexic . . . in a weird way, that critic is there to spoil his dinner."
He dismisses the negative critical responses received recently by Tony Kushner's Tony-winning Broadway musical, Caroline, or Change, which, along with Retreat from Moscow, is one of the best works he's seen "in maybe a decade".
"What that's about is the inability of the particular critic to deal with actual human emotion," he says. "And family emotion. Both plays were about families in crisis. And, you know,the job of the critic is not just to inform himself about the history of the theatre, but, if possible, to have an informed heart, too. And where those things are together, I think you get a very rich assessment."
It's not, however, that Lahr can't crack the critical whip himself. The response of theatre, on both sides of the Atlantic, to the current political situation has, he says, been "absolutely woeful in terms of the artfulness of the expression". Only a work that dates back to 1997, Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, captures "the terrorism, and the privilege and the increasing barbarism of American culture".
Part of the problem with current theatre stems from a failure to "see" clearly in the way he regards as so vital.
"The culture is traumatised. And that trauma is reflected in its inability to think well," he says. "To embrace what is a paradigm shift in the culture. And it's going to take a while to adjust."
In the meantime, he says, the secret of the disgruntled critic is "to find ways of saying 'no' that are not annihilating".
Two years after his father's death, when he published his biography of him, Lahr made a gesture of recognition, and of redress, towards the annihilation the man had always enacted on himself as an actor. He used, as the cover illustration, an image of Bert not as the Cowardly Lion, but as Estragon in the 1956 American début of Waiting for Godot, the role of which his father had been most proud. It's what he does, too, in the pages of the New Yorker: to see the star in another light, to capture the essence of who they are, who they want to be. The experience of that has been his own consolation.
"I've written all my life," he says. "And the years on the New Yorker have been the absolute happiest of my writing life. To be with this group of people, to say, in the fear that impedes writing so much, that I have a friend next door who will look at this, and if it isn't good they will help . . . it's a wonderful collaboration."
And from collaboration, for Lahr, comes the closest thing to understanding.