It turned out that my Washington house did not look like a Washington house. This was the judgment of Paramount, the studio that made Heartburn, and so my expectation that my weary kitchen would be updated and the outside of the house given some badly needed paint was dashed. As far as I was concerned, this was yet another sad Hollywood story.
In fact, the movie wasn’t really filmed in Washington at all. The lone exception was an exterior shot of a house located in the city’s Capitol Hill section and owned by a Washington Post colleague of mine—probably the richest person on the staff and undoubtedly someone not in need of a new kitchen. Another scene was shot in Alexandria, Virginia, a Georgetown clone across the Potomac from Washington. The rest of the movie was filmed in New York.
Heartburn opened in the summer of 1986, by which time Nora was living with Nick Pileggi—or he with her, actually. Nick had moved into the apartment in the Apthorp where he, in time, would establish an office high in one of the building’s rooftop aeries. Nora would take yet another Apthorp apartment for her own office.
With three apartments, Nora and Nick quickly established themselves as major Upper West Side figures. The neighborhood was to her liking. Zabar’s, the celebrated and nearly mythical food emporium, was a mere one block north and Nora was one of its more famous patrons. (She made a cameo appearance in a film about Zabar’s attempted by Rachel Zabar but never completed.) Citarella’s, not quite as renowned but better for rotisserie chicken, was only four blocks to the south, and when a union threw up a picket line blocking its entrance, Nora had a genuine, if somewhat comical, crisis. She was constitutionally unable to cross a picket line. On the other hand, the fish at Citarella’s was nonpareil, especially the baby clams. Nora did what she could. The strike was precipitated by the firing of three employees who allegedly walked out over working conditions. Fire them, the shop’s lawyer suggested. Nora had a better idea. Fire the lawyer, she told the shop’s owner on the phone.
The Apthorp was built between 1906 and 1908 and covered a square city block. It was a massive structure, twelve stories high, with a rare interior courtyard that, for all its Old World charm, meant that some apartments were deprived of light. Not Nora’s, however. It looked out over West End Avenue and, beyond it and Riverside Drive, the thrilling Hudson River. After that, came Jersey, which, on a clear day, was still Jersey.
Nora wrote about Zabar’s. She wrote about Citarella’s. She had Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan walk the streets of the Upper West Side in You’ve Got Mail. It’s hard to say she made her neighborhood famous—it had been featured in numerous movies, including Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters—but she helped to make it chic—so fashionable that the Apthorp’s zooming rents eventually forced her out. She decamped to the Upper East Side, where, with the same enthusiasm, she discovered another Citarella’s and numerous other stores catering to what has to be the world’s most affluent and demanding customers.
In Heartburn, the character based on Nora repairs to her father’s spacious Apthorp apartment, but for most of the movie she’s in Washington. For this movie, I again had to play the role of the Carl Bernstein expert. This time it was not Dustin Hoffman who came to see me in my tiny, airless, glass-enclosed office at the Washington Post, but the extravagantly talented singer and actor Mandy Patinkin. He stuffed himself into my cramped office’s only guest chair—and confessed himself puzzled: Why had Nora left Carl?
He was having an affair, I said.
So what? Patinkin said.
I understood what Patinkin was saying. Extramarital affairs are common and not always reason enough to sunder a marriage. I know Carl felt that way—not that he had not grievously wronged his wife but that she had overreacted. Patinkin, in any event, never made it onto the screen. Nichols fired him for lacking the requisite chemistry with Meryl Streep. Patinkin took his firing hard—“I thought my life was over,” he told the New York Times in 2013—and discomforted everyone by showing up somewhat dazed on the set anyway. He apparently was surprised by his firing. Maybe for the wrong reason, I was not.
Patinkin’s replacement turned out to be no less problematic, but in a different way. He was Jack Nicholson, who was not, as was Patinkin, a stage actor looking to make a name for himself in movies, but already a titanic Hollywood figure. By the time he signed for Heartburn, Nicholson had been nominated for eight Oscars and had won twice—for Best Actor in a Leading Role for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1979) and for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Terms of Endearment (1984). He was not only one hell of an actor, but unlike Patinkin, he had an outsized off-screen persona as a gadabout and roué. In a clichéd, tabloid sense, he was perfect to play Carl, but bringing him on changed the chemistry of the cast. Nicholson was no mere actor. He was a movie star.
Almost imperceptibly, the story started to drift his way. Nora probably noticed, but she was the writer and in no position to countermand Nichols. Streep was, and she stepped in. “I said, ‘This is about a person who got hit by the truck. It’s not about the truck.’
“They forgot about that for a minute, when he first came in,” she said. “They really did.”
Among the subjects I did not discuss with Nora were the challenges and difficulties of being a female director. We talked movies and moviemaking plenty of times—the inhumane stinginess of the studio, for instance, or the demands of stars for something another star had (John Travolta wanted a third trailer, just like Will Smith.)—but not the challenges of being a woman in a job usually held by men. It took Meryl Streep to provide some insight.
Meryl Streep has spent a lifetime being directed by men. Of her approximately seventy films, only a handful were directed by women—one of them being Nora’s Julie & Julia. As a result, she is keenly aware of what happens when the character of a woman—the story of a woman, the emotions of a woman, the very soul of a woman—gets interpreted by a man.
“It’s harder for men to imagine they are women than for women to imagine themselves on the male trajectory through a story. I’m not sure why that is, but I do know that with directors, having a female protagonist is a bigger leap than for a woman to imagine what it’s like to be the guy.”
Nonetheless, not even Streep could fully contain Nicholson. He was a riveting screen personality, and he endowed Carl with a winning humanity that was entirely lacking in the book—and that, at Carl’s insistence, had gone into the movie script.
Still, for all the attention the movie got, Heartburn was no blockbuster. It was, at best, a modest hit and it garnered no awards. The critics were not kind. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert panned it. “This is a bitter, sour movie about two people who are only marginally interesting,” he wrote.
Ebert was an important critic. Walter Goodman was less so, but his newspaper, the New York Times, was more important than either of them. “It isn’t the actors’ fault,” he wrote with apparent regret. “Heartburn stands as testimony to the limitations of star power.”
The pallid reviews notwithstanding, Heartburn was a huge success for Nora. As a screenwriter, she now had two movies to her credit—a lifetime’s for all too many writers. Nicholson had expanded a small picture into a huge one, but he was not even remotely Carl. Streep, though, became Nora, and Nora emerged through Streep as a distinct personality in her own right. She had written the movie based on her own book, but what mattered most was that in the addled mind of the American public, she had been given substance on the very big screen.
“I highly recommend Meryl Streep play you,” Nora said at Streep’s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award tribute. “If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl to play you. You will feel much better. If you get rear-ended in a parking lot, have Meryl Streep play you. If the dingo eats your baby, call Meryl.”
In 2007, secretly sick with cancer, Nora called Streep one last time. She asked her to read the script for Julie & Julia.