When Nichols Met May

From an April 1961 profile in The New Yorker by Robert Rice:

Nichols and May began their life together with an improvisation. It was a performance designed solely for their private entertainment, though it may well have also entertained, or astounded, a number of loiterers in the waiting room of the Randolph Street station of the Illinois Central in Chicago, which is where it took place. One evening in the spring of 1954, Nichols was walking through the waiting room on his way to a train and Miss May was sitting on a bench reading a magazine. They knew each other by sight, both having for a time hung around the University of Chicago and been associated with various little-theatre groups that originated on or around its campus. As Nichols remembers it, he had avoided becoming acquainted with Miss May, because he was sure she was sneering at him. He still speaks of “the look of utter contempt” that he believes was on her face as she watched him playing a part in Strindberg’s “Miss Julie”—the first time he recalls seeing her. Miss May denies that she ever regarded Nichols with contempt. “I didn’t regard him at all,” she said recently. In any case, that day in the waiting room Nichols resolved to face up to Miss May. He sat down beside her and, talking out of the corner of his mouth, assumed the character of a secret agent making contact with a colleague. She responded in a heavy Russian accent, and they went into a long scene that Nichols recalls as “half spy, half pick-up.” They no longer remember just what they said, of course, but if by any chance the scene foreshadowed a spy spot they did a few months ago for “Monitor,” it may have begun something like this:

Nichols: I beg your pardon. Do you have a light?

Miss May: Yes, certainly.

Nichols: I had a lighter, but (pause) I lost it on Fifty-seventh Street!

Miss May: Oh. Then you’re Agent X-9?

(via SIX at 6)

I’ve been unable to find any trace of Robert Rice, save for his bylines in The New Yorker from the 1940s through the 1960s: he seems to have left no trace of himself. His most cited piece seems to be his 1958 profile of Leonard Bernstein.