CHAPTER 22

NORA EPHRON

Exacting

NORA EPHRON WAS THAT RAREST of difficult women: the lovable bitch. I’m not disrespecting the dead. I’ve had a girl crush on Nora since I first read Heartburn in 1984. The rainy afternoon I finished her best-selling, lightly fictionalized memoir, I took the bus downtown to the library where I spent the afternoon reading her as-yet-uncollected magazine and newspaper pieces (she wrote many memorable pieces for Newsweek, Esquire, New York magazine, and many others, before going on to become a best-selling author and one of Hollywood’s most successful directors). These days, that kind of devotion would violate stalking laws.

Years later I met her at a party in New York. It was perhaps the late 1990s. She was enrobed in her usual black finery. Her hair was a little fluffy—I don’t think she was getting it blown out weekly yet. I shook her very slender hand, felt myself blush, and whispered, “So nice to meet you.” The only other option was to weep with love and throw myself on her narrow, polished black shoes. She said, “So nice to meet you.” She may have been mocking me. I then turned to feign interest in the drinks table, because I feared I might further embarrass myself. Behind me I heard her ask someone, “Who was that again?”

This wasn’t why Nora was a bitch. (She had every reason to wonder whether I’d actually been invited to the party or had recently escaped from the closest minimum-security facility.) She was bitchy because she was exacting and perfectionistic—and because even though she was a woman who reveled in her femininity, she refused to be mawkish or sentimental. She called it as she saw it, and her prose was so sharp you could cut yourself. In a 2010 piece for Slate, “Who Gets to Be a Feminist?” the other esteemed authors dutifully weighed in on this very serious matter. Nora wrote: “I know that I’m supposed to write 500 words on this subject, but it seems much simpler: You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.” Take that, Earnest Content Providers.

Nora was born to a couple of screenwriters on May 19, 1941. Henry and Phoebe Ephron were theater people who liked Hollywood money, and moved their family to Beverly Hills. After graduating from Beverly Hills High in 1958 and breezing through Wellesley, graduating in 1962, she returned to New York, where she went on to become the new and improved Dorothy Parker. (With respect to Mrs. Parker, Nora was consistently funnier on more topics, and never stank up the joint with her self-pity. Nora didn’t believe in self-pity.)

She started in the mail room at Newsweek, then moved to the New York Post; her career caught fire in the late 1960s. By 1972 she had a regular column in Esquire, writing personal essays about the Beatles, the small size of her breasts, a silly feud between Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. She was called one of the early practitioners of New Journalism, but claimed not to know what that meant. “I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms,” she observed. She was all about women power, but wasn’t above poking fun at the parts of the women’s movement she found to be ridiculous. That impulse to point out the ludicrous aspect of things she generally approved of was part of her exacting nature. She wasn’t one to let anyone get away with anything if she could help it. She could be both ally and merciless critic.

In 1976, Nora married Carl Bernstein, the hotshot Washington Post reporter who, along with Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate scandal and brought down down the Nixon presidency. Nora and Carl were a Washington, D.C., writer power couple. (Such a thing no longer exists.) They had a son, Jacob. Then, when she was very pregnant with a second child, she discovered Carl was cheating on her with a friend.

One of the great advantages of having a smart, sophisticated screenwriter mother is that the kind of wisdom passed down to you is not how to fold a fitted sheet but that everything is copy. Phoebe taught Nora that everything that happened to her in life could be transposed for fun, profit, and revenge, into art. In 1983, Nora published the aforementioned modern classic, Heartburn, the blistering roman à clef about the end of her marriage to Bernstein. It became a best seller, and in 1986, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred in the movie version, for which Nora wrote the screenplay.

(Things turned out less well for Bernstein. He went from superstar investigative journalist to gossip column fodder, which led to a rank-and-file position at ABC News. In 1987, he was not invited to Washington Post editor Katharine Graham’s 70th birthday party. He consoled himself by dating Bianca Jagger. I don’t want to make you feel too sorry for Carl. Everything is copy, and who knew that better than Carl Bernstein?)

A year later, in 1987, Nora met screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi. They adored each other; she was more delightful under Nick’s devoted eye. When asked to contribute to an anthology of six-word memoirs, Nora wrote: “Secret to life: marry an Italian.”

In 1992, Nora directed her first film, This Is My Life, from a screenplay she co-wrote with her sister, Delia, based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer. It was a flop. Nora hated failing. She did not take flops in stride. She was not philosophical about them. “Flops stay with you in a way that hits never do,” she wrote. “They torture you. You toss and turn. You replay. You recast. You recut. You rewrite. You restage. You run through the what-ifs and the if-onlys. You cast about for blame.”

But in 1993 came Sleepless in Seattle. Nora made directing seem effortless—but then as now, Hollywood was the consummate boys’ club. She had begun directing because as a child, she’d seen firsthand how poorly the film business treated writers (which probably contributed to her parents’ steep slide into alcoholism when she was a teenager). Also, she enjoyed directing because she was exacting. She was famous for firing people. She fired children.

Nora became famous primarily for her trinity of old-fashioned romantic comedies: When Harry Met Sally…(1989, directed by Rob Reiner); Sleepless in Seattle (1993); and You’ve Got Mail (1998). The more recent Julie & Julia (2009) is a valentine to both Julia Child and Nora’s love of cooking. Modern classics though they may be, the “Nora edges” were by necessity rounded off in the Hollywood router. Her writing is much bitchier, and thus better, all the way around.

DURING THE FILMING OF Julie & Julia in 2008, Nora was already sick. In 2006 she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow. She told her family and swore a handful of intimates to secrecy, but otherwise continued on with her life. No one—close friends who’d produced her movies, editors, not even Meryl Streep, who played Nora in Heartburn—had known.

Nora wrote no witty novel about dying, no sly rom-com screenplay or slim book of perfect, hilarious essays. In her last days, she was working on a play called Lucky Guy, set in the late 1980s, about a tabloid newspaper reporter. She, who had written frankly about her nutty parents and their mad drinking, her famous husband’s adultery, her shame over her sagging neck, wrote nothing about dying. She wasn’t having any of it—in part, I’m going to presume, because she found the experience to be both tedious and not something she could control. And above all, Nora liked to be in control.

I, who have read every syllable she’s written, suspected something was up when I Remember Nothing, published in 2010, failed to live up to the million-copy best seller I Feel Bad About My Neck, published in 2006, but written before her diagnosis. “I Remember Nothing is fluffy and companionable, a nifty airport read from a writer capable of much, much more,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. Maybe, I thought, all that Huffington Post blogging was making her sloppy. But of all the things Nora Ephron was—domineering, persnickety, warm, generous, judgmental—sloppy she was not.

Maybe she didn’t tell people she was sick because her great mantra was to be the hero, rather than the victim, of her own life. It was something she told the Class of 1996 when she gave the commencement speech at Wellesley that year. She also wrote about it in I Remember Nothing. “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero, rather than the victim of the joke.”

Nora kept a picture of mobster John Gotti on her desk to bolster her during her post-flop moments. It was taken on the way out of the courthouse on the day he was handed a sentence of life in prison. He wore an excellent, well-cut suit. He looked terrific. I imagine Nora was thinking that she wanted to go out like John Gotti. She didn’t want to be a dying person dispensing wisdom. She despised complaining—it was one thing she hated about feminism, all that kvetching. “All those women-in-film panels!” she once said, throwing up her hands. One night she appeared with Arianna Huffington at an Advice for Women event (that was literally the name) about the “myriad challenges women face today.” Her best advice: Be in denial.

Upon Nora’s death on June 26, 2012, Lena Dunham (see Chapter 28) wrote in a tender remembrance for the New Yorker: “Nora introduced me to, in no particular order: several ear, nose, and throat doctors; the Patagonia jackets she favored when on set because they were ‘thinner than a sweater but warmer than a parka’…the photography of Julius Shulman; the concept of eating lunch at Barneys; self-respect; the complex legend of Helen Gurley Brown; the Jell-O mold; her beloved sister Delia.”

Nora introduced me to the concept that a woman could be opinionated, witty, exacting, and still beloved. In a word: difficult.