For Nora every dinner party was a little movie. We all had our parts to play. She would do the set, which was her apartment, and she had already done the casting and, often, some of the script. But it was up to the “actors” to act. The telling of a story was as important as its content—there was little use in having the latter without the former.
As for me, I was one of Nora’s frequent non-famous guests. She collected many of them, mostly writers, and often women, whose names were recognizable to other writers but not the general public. Nora was not starstruck, although some of her guests surely were. Some nights it seemed that her round table was where the red carpet ended.
It was possible to flunk dinner party—as if it were a college course. I can’t supply the names of those who did, who were never invited back, but I am sure it happened. I myself felt I had flunked many times. Since I was not famous, I felt I had to be funny or interesting, but this was a grievous misjudgment of what Nora expected. Her guests might be famous, but while that may have been an admissions ticket, they were also expected to be entertaining in some way. Above all, they had to be both likable and to like the other guests. Nora over time assembled a core cadre of dinner guests. Some were actors and some were directors and some were writers—but what they all had in common was obvious affection for one another.
At a Nora Ephron dinner party, it was often not enough to come up with a topic for discussion; guests were also required to play a game afterward. One of Nora’s favorites was called Running Charades. Guests were divided into two teams, an umpire or judge supervised, and each team was given the same list of items or phrases that comprised a theme. The writer John Leo remembers that an item might be the book title House of Seven Gables, and another might be the Muhammad Ali phrase “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
Each contestant would have to act at least one of these out, and after several more had been performed, some very smart person might connect Clark Gable with Butterfly McQueen and realize that the theme was the movie Gone with the Wind. The team that guessed it in the least amount of time was the winner. It was that simple.
It was also that terrifying. Among Nora’s guests were entertainers like Bob Balaban and his wife, Lynn Grossman, a writer and one-time pianist who had put herself through college accompanying drag queens in piano bars (also conducting tours of Lincoln Center). These were performers. Even so, some performers got stage fright. Diane Keaton one night simply refused to play.
I loved being asked to Nora’s for dinner. Who would be there? What stars? What interesting people? What would she cook? But along with anticipation came anxiety. The invitation was similar to being asked to make a toast: How nice. How flattering. But how nerve-wracking. The desire for applause, for acknowledgment as a wit, was more than offset by the fear of failure. I had seen the funniest men of my day flame out at some event or other. Being a dinner party guest of Nora’s was not quite the same, of course, but one was expected to sparkle at dinner and then, afterward, to act out some nonsense word or phrase in a game of Running Charades. It was beyond me.
I would meet the challenge of, say, acting out “Clark Gable” by exploding into a sweat. The entire effort was an exercise in post-traumatic stress disorder, reliving moments from high school when the teacher called me to the blackboard to solve a geometry problem. I would stare at the triangles and rectangles much as Napoleon’s troops much have stared at the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta stone, and no meaning would announce itself. “Clark Gable” was a geometry problem with a mustache and dimples.
The “teacher,” in this case Nora, took the games very seriously. Everyone knew that and was appropriately intimidated. Once, a flummoxed player, frustrated to the point of criminal insanity, inadvertently blurted out the word she was supposed to be acting out. It was a reckless, virtually suicidal thing to do, and Nora exploded. She stopped the game and said, “We do not play this way. That’s cheating.”
The “cheater” looked stricken.
Holy shit! a guest exclaimed.
Once—just once—I cheated. It was more of a prank than an actual cheat, but, anyway, I got my entire team to go along and we ran away with the game.
Nora was dismayed that she had lost—or, maybe, that I had won. I felt regret, remorse, as if I had made her lose confidence in herself. Out of pity, I owned up. I cheated, I announced, thinking that getting away with cheating was more of a triumph than winning the game. She was dumbfounded, stunned, uncomprehending. I had cheated? What kind of person would do such a thing? What kind of person would treat a game as if it was, well, a game? I felt as if I had burst some kind of bubble, like telling a kid that there is no Santa Claus. For a painful moment, I feared our friendship would not survive, as if I had cheated on her.
The essence of Nora was her work—her writing. No, that’s not right. The essence for me was Nora herself. And I could say, too, that the essence of Nora was those games. She had a severity that could frighten people, frighten the very same people who loved her. She had a strange power that compelled people to play games they did not enjoy—as if they understood, in some Marxian way, that they had to do this bit for the greater good of the party.
Nora knew her power. She knew how much she meant to people. Those people were not always aware of her insecurities and how much she sometimes needed them. But with very few exceptions—Mike Nichols, Bob Gottlieb (her editor at Knopf), Amanda Urban, and possibly (but not always) me—she was the dominant one in every relationship. (Her marriage to Nick was in a different category.)
It wasn’t that Nora was one of those characters with multiple personalities. The overall personality, the character trait, was love, affection, caring solicitude. When her friends were in trouble, they turned to Nora. They didn’t even have to turn. When the wife of the performer Martin Short died, Nora and Nick just arrived at the house with food. She brought food the next night and the next and “on the fourth night, she arrived with a giant platter of fried chicken.”
“I said, ‘Nora, it’s just the kids and me,’ ” Short said. “ ‘We have so much food already.’ She handed me the platter and said, ‘And now you have more food.’ ”
When Nancy Dolman Short died in 2010, Marty Short was already famous and successful and a charter member, if there could be such a thing, of a clique of the celebrated who cruised the Mediterranean in the summer and the Caribbean in the winter on David Geffen’s boat. So Nora’s solicitousness could be seen as either the attention due a friend or the attention due a star. But the attention and sympathy she gave Short in those days—and many after—were hardly any different from the way she reacted when a somewhat less famous writer named Deborah Copaken Kogan, whose book Shutterbabe Nora had admired, called her in East Hampton in something of a panic: She was thinking of leaving her husband.
While they were on the phone, Nora checked the bus schedule and had Kogan come out from Manhattan. She served her lunch, temporarily resolved the marital situation—and put her on the next bus back to the city. Nora gave that writer more than a quickie meal and some wise words. She gave her an afternoon—time. In the short run, she had no more of that than anyone else. In the long run, she had less.
By the time Nora met Kogan, Nora was already a famous person. But this ability of Nora’s to engender trust was not dependent on celebrity or popularity, but was, for want of a better word, innate. Back in her high school days she became the confessor to Barry Diller, a Beverly Hills kid himself who lived about two blocks from her and who was a frequent companion as they walked to and from school. Diller was to become a media magnate, a billionaire, but, more to the point, an occasionally irascible and coldly methodical tycoon. He opened up to Nora. They were two years apart in age, Nora the older one, and she was in some ways the worldlier one. His feelings for her, always complicated, came out in verbal spasms of contradictions:
“It was not hard to know why I talked to her. Not that she was wise. But I trusted her, I trusted her. I don’t know if trusted her. I talked to her, I did talk to her.”