The Eternal Appeal of Hairlessness, Part Deux

In Chip McGrath’s profile of Mike Nichols in the Times this past Sunday, we learn that the director of the cinema landmark, “The Graduate,”

“wakes up every morning…, collects himself and, wearing a wig and paste-on eyebrows, plays a character called Mike Nichols.”

Apparently Nichols’s permanent hairlessness stems from a childhood reaction to whooping cough vaccine. But being undowny has  not impeded the hawkishly good-looking Nichols’s loveability, even when he was a child: when Nichols arrived to the States from Berlin at the age of 7 in 1939, he was armed with only two sentences in English–“I do not speak English, ” and “Please do not kiss me.”