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he read every Eugene O’Neill play he could find, enthralled, as someone who had worked hard and quickly to master English, to discover that “you can be a very great writer without necessarily using words very well.
Jews in Nazi Germany didn’t have marital difficulties. It wasn’t possible to concentrate on such luxuries,”
“I wish I’d known him longer. We missed each other. We were just getting to the point when we might have found each other,” said Nichols. “He died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought.”
Afterward, Redford went over to Nichols’s rented house in Beverly Hills and got the bad news over a game of pool. “You can’t play a loser,” Nichols said. “Look at you. How many times have you struck out with a woman?” “And he said, I swear to you, ‘What do you mean?’” said Nichols. “He didn’t even understand the concept.
He returned to therapy and, after decades of barely giving his heritage a thought, started to contend with some of the feelings about his Jewishness that his mother’s death had reawakened—“the idea that all of this is borrowed time, that I should have been six million and one.”
I’m genuinely happy, probably for the first time,” Nichols told his therapist. “I love my wife. I love my life. I love my kids—they’re turning out to be great people. I love my work. Why am I still so pissed off? Why hasn’t that gone away?”
He died a short time later, at home, surrounded by the people he loved the most. He left behind an appointment book for the coming week that was completely full.
