The only novel Nora Ephron ever published was about Carl Bernstein and the way he’d ruined her life. The pair met in swinging 1970s New York, perhaps hitting it off because they both had somewhat combative spirits. Bernstein still had the laurels of his role in Watergate; Ephron was a bestselling feminist writer and a staple on television, already established as a kind of public wit. In tabloid terms, it was kismet, two brilliant people hitting it off. They quickly became a kind of It Couple, marrying in 1976. They were both on top of the world—until he cheated, and then they weren’t.
This, at least, is the situation Heartburn drops you into: the blood-and-guts end of what could have been a perfectly good marriage. “The first day I did not think it was funny,” Ephron’s narrator Rachel Samstat writes. “I didn’t think it was funny the third day either, but I managed to make a little joke about it.” Or not so little, because Heartburn is one long joke, interrupted by recipes, about the despair inherent in having to leave one’s philandering husband while handling two toddlers. The narrator lacerates herself for not having noticed the affair sooner, but it is true that she is much harder on her husband. “The man is capable of having sex with a Venetian blind,” Ephron wrote. The book is even self-conscious about the way it skewers the husband:
Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? And I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it!
Heartburn was the epitome of the line Ephron always used to describe her own mission: “Everything is copy.” She’d taken a horrible experience and turned it into something everyone loved. Though it attracted a few skeptical press notices, Heartburn was a bestseller. It made Ephron temporarily rich; it got her away from Bernstein. So it served many of the purposes it was meant to serve, except one: it meant she’d always be defined by this experience. And Nora Ephron, by all accounts, did not like to dwell on anything uncomfortable. “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim,” she told a crowd of graduates at Wellesley, late in her life.
If that line sometimes sounded both glib and inspirational, Ephron knew a little something about victims. Of all the people in this book, she was the only one with a direct connection to Dorothy Parker. Her screenwriter parents had befriended Parker in Hollywood. Ephron’s own memories of her were hazy, though Parker was in and out of the house throughout Nora’s childhood: “She was frail and tiny and twinkly.” Still the young Ephron came to idolize Parker, or at least the figure she cut. Ephron was enchanted by the idea that Parker had been “the only woman at the table,” the wit and the genius who was the life of every well-spoken party in Manhattan. She wanted to do that too. She called it her Dorothy Parker problem. Of course, a biography of Parker would later disabuse her of those illusions about Parker’s life, would fill her in on the alcoholism and the “victim.” Ephron claimed to have then abandoned the dream, albeit reluctantly. “Before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth, and I have trouble giving it up.”
The bursting of that bubble came closer to home than Ephron admitted. Born in 1941, Nora was Phoebe and Henry Ephron’s eldest daughter of four. And by an alchemy of disposition and natural talent, the family generated plenty of text on themselves. All four sisters would eventually become writers. Three of them wrote memoirs. Henry Ephron wrote one too. The art of self-presentation began, by all accounts, at the Ephron dinner table. Nightly, there was a contest to be the funniest person in the family. In the family annals, and particularly those that Nora left behind, these were largely portrayed as jocular occasions. They taught her the liberating power of humor, she said.
Funniest of all was her mother, Phoebe. Like Rebecca West’s mother, she was a woman of many talents. Also like Rebecca West’s mother, she had possibly married the wrong man.
Phoebe Ephron grew up in the Bronx. She worked as a shop clerk. When she met Henry, then just an aspiring playwright, at a party, it was he who pursued her. Before she’d agree to marry him, she insisted that she get to read his work, to see if it was good enough. This was a cherished family story. She was always an authority in her own right, always holding the attention of a room. She told her daughters there were no values in life higher than independence. “If I haven’t raised you to make your own decisions, it won’t do any good to tell you what I think,” Nora recorded her mother saying to her children from the time they were very young. She lived her life as a kind of exception, too. Phoebe Ephron was, along with Parker, one of the few female screenwriters in Hollywood, and she insisted on doing things that only men did:
She was not doctrinaire or dogmatic about it; although she named me after the heroine of The Doll’s House, she could not bear being called a feminist. She merely was, and simply by her example, we all grew up with blind faith in our own abilities and destinies.
That all sounds adorably plucky, a perfect feminist story about someone who hated the word “feminist.” (There is also a beautiful coincidence here in both Ephron and West owing Ibsen their names.) But Ephron would reveal, later, that when she was fifteen her mother began to drink heavily. “One day she wasn’t an alcoholic,” she wrote. “And the next day she was a complete lush.” With the drinking came a good amount of screaming and fighting. (Henry also drank, and was a serial philanderer to boot.) Ephron confessed that in Phoebe’s later years, she even became frightened of her mother. Once, when Phoebe visited Wellesley, where Ephron attended college, Ephron found herself continually waiting for the other shoe to drop. To Ephron’s classmates Phoebe was something of a glamorous figure then; Ephron’s parents had written a play that was a great success on Broadway at the time. Ephron spent the night terrified her mother would start on one of her screaming jags. The alcoholism would continue for fifteen years, more or less uninterrupted, until Phoebe Ephron died at the age of fifty-seven from cirrhosis of the liver.
The eulogy Nora Ephron gave for her would not mention all of this, because it took a very long time for Ephron to process it. Phoebe Ephron was the person who’d coined the phrase “Everything is copy.” But not everything was copy, at first. It would take until Ephron’s seventies for her to admit in print that she had wished her mother dead for a long time. Before that the story was cleaner, more idyllic, the simple passing of the talent for wisecracking from one generation to the next. Ephron often retold a certain deathbed story:
She knew, I think, that she was dying, and she turned to me. “You’re a reporter, Nora,” she said. “Take notes.” That makes her sound tougher than she really was. She was tough—and that was good—but she was also soft, somewhat mystical, and intensely proud.
The “Take notes” quote was something Ephron would repeat again and again, but the bit about softness—about her mother’s contradictions—mostly disappeared until Ephron wrote about her mother’s alcoholism in one of her last essay collections in 2011. So Phoebe Ephron, tough and funny as she was, taught her daughter a little something about humanity, too.
From the time Ephron was very small, she had to build a kind of persona. Her parents took “Everything is copy” seriously, to a fault. When she was a baby, her parents wrote a play about their experiences living in the Bronx with Phoebe’s parents called Three Is a Family. It was just a light farce, meant as an evening’s entertainment, but it provoked bad reactions. When the play was made into a film, Bosley Crowther, the imperious Times movie reviewer Pauline Kael so hated, called it “strictly infantile.” Then, when Ephron was at Wellesley, her letters home inspired another play, in fact her parents’ last real hit: Take Her, She’s Mine. Evidently proud of their daughter’s wit, they couldn’t resist directly quoting her in the play:
P.S. I’m the only one in my class still wearing a retainer on her teeth. It’s not the kind of thing I care to be individual about. Please ask Dr. Schick if it’s essential. If he says yes, I shall probably lose it.
It debuted on Broadway while Ephron was still a college student at Wellesley in Massachusetts. The critics immediately loved it. Women’s Wear Daily called it a “Tempest of Mirth.” Variety approved of it, saying it was “told interestingly and there are knowing chuckles and substantial guffaws which pepper the dialog.” It ran for nearly a year, from 1961 to 1962. On campus, everyone knew about it.
Ephron would report all of this with the nonchalance that was her trademark. But at a very young age, she had already had the opportunity to learn the frustration that came with being fodder for someone else’s work, having her life mined for plays and screenplays. As Joan Didion famously put it, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Ephron knew that rule at an earlier age than most people. She never spoke of it bothering her, but it informed everything she did.
She clearly wasn’t fond of looking back, anyway. When Ephron left Wellesley to go to New York in 1962, she always said she felt she was coming home. The bulk of her childhood was spent in Beverly Hills, but she insisted she had never liked it there. She did not write much about high school, and photographs of her as a teenager make her look awkward, not at all a snappy dresser. She did not seem to have any particular professional ambitions; she was not, like Sontag, spending her teenage years pining for an imaginary Europe. When she arrived in New York she simply went to an employment agency and announced that she wished to be a journalist. The employment agency had some openings at Newsweek, but the agent told her women were not writers there.
It would never have crossed my mind to object or to say, “You’re going to turn out to be wrong about me.” It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule.
She lived together with a friend on Sullivan Street, in what was then known as a southern part of Greenwich Village, and moved in in the middle of a neighborhood celebration of the Feast of St. Anthony.
The Newsweek job was not as a reporter, merely as a researcher. So it was a bit of a bust, writingwise; the closest Ephron came to bylines was seeing them on the desk of the editor in chief for whom she worked. Like so many others in this book, she got her break not from the editor of an established magazine, but rather from the editor of a smaller one, in this case a humor magazine called Monocle. The editor was Victor Navasky, who would later go on to become the editor of the Nation. Ephron met him at one of the many parties the magazine held. He found her funny. And when the newspaper strike hit in late 1962, he asked her to write a parody of what was then a famous gossip column, called the Lyons’ Den, written by Leonard Lyons. This got the attention of the editors of the New York Post, who promptly offered her a job as a reporter.
It was the publisher of the Post, a society matron named Dorothy Schiff, who’d been impressed and suggested they grab up the talent. Schiff embodied a kind of moneyed female independence that she shared with Katharine Graham, the later publisher of the Washington Post. Ephron would later write a scathing assessment of Schiff, one so mean that she felt compelled to preface it with: “I feel bad about what I’m going to do here.” But without Schiff, there never would have been the Nora Ephron that America came to know. Being a reporter first and a writer second was an important part of Ephron’s persona in those years. She alternated the people she’d say inspired her to become a journalist. Sometimes she’d say it was Hildy Johnson in the 1930s comedy His Girl Friday. Ephron liked jokes and she liked comedy. She viewed them as essential survival skills. And that meant early on that Ephron knew she wanted to be an observer rather than a participant in public affairs:
People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate. What separates me from what I write about is, I suspect, a sense of the absurd that makes it difficult for me to take many things terribly seriously.
There was absurdity aplenty, apparently, at the New York Post. Although she would always credit the place with having taught her how to report and how to write quickly, she did not like the facilities. The entire office was filthy; reporters did not have assigned desks and had to fight for their spots anew each day. But Ephron had an innate toughness, perhaps inherited from or even cultivated by her mother. She seemed to flourish under the challenge. She reported on everything: a great deal of crime, quite a few profiles of local politicians, even one of a hot new young writer named Susan Sontag. (The article is pedestrian; they talked about life in the spotlight, about Sontag’s stepfather and how he told her she’d never marry if she read too much.)
But the work was not always good. Schiff, who was not particularly serious about either her paper’s reputation or her own, was a recurring source of oddity and anxiety. She was cheap and did not like to be generous to her employees. Schiff was the only woman publisher in New York at the time, but she was no feminist. She disliked Betty Friedan because she worried that reading the Feminine Mystique had encouraged her daughter to leave her husband and get into politics. Once, Dorothy Schiff tried to get Ephron to investigate whether the director Otto Preminger, who lived next door to Schiff, had installed a sauna in his apartment. As evidence of this possibility, Schiff said she could hear running water at all hours of the day. Ephron patiently sent her a memorandum explaining that saunas did not employ running water. Schiff assigned the story to another investigative reporter. He couldn’t find anything either.
It bears mentioning that we know so many stories about the absurdity of Dorothy Schiff—an absurdity that might otherwise have sunk from the historical record—because Nora Ephron herself recorded them. Long after she left the Post, Ephron listed not only all Schiff’s bad qualities but also the shortcomings of the newspaper, in a media column she was writing for a magazine. In the column she said that although she had recently patched things up with Schiff after telling the Preminger story on the radio, she was going to attack Schiff again. Mostly because the Post was a “bad newspaper,” and because Schiff was the Marie Antoinette who helmed it: “As in let them read schlock.”
The very quality of detachment that had made Ephron a good reporter also made her quite willing to attack her employers. Over the years, her willingness to anger the people she knew, to attack them the same way Kael or West or any of her predecessors had, would become a professional asset. The ferocity of her remarks about, say, Julie Nixon Eisenhower—”I think she’s a spider”—is what got her on television and made her reputation as a social critic. This was all long before she became known as the warmer, more forgiving writer of 1980s romantic comedies, but on some level detachment was a habit that never left her. “I think she was more devoted to language than to people,” the actress Meg Ryan once said.
Ephron went freelance after she left the Post. Sensing a good reviewer in the making, the first place that really began to make use of her talents was the New York Times Book Review. It was there that she published a parody of Ayn Rand’s Hemingway-with-a-traumatic-brain-injury prose style:
Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face painted, his hair the color of a bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean, planes, Howard Roark laughed.
Every subject the Times gave her, she tore into with great appetite. Dick Cavett, the host of a talk show where writers argued about concepts that were over his carefully coiffed head, got an early Nora Ephron profile. His manager called Cavett Mr. Television, which at first seemed to embarrass Cavett. But his repudiation of the title, and his self-criticism, took up four long, trivia-laden paragraphs, which Ephron quoted without interruption to give a sense of Cavett’s self-absorption:
I also got letters asking me why I always wore the same tie. I don’t. I have two ties.
She wrote an appreciation of Rex Reed, the journalist who would later become a film critic, by calling him “a saucy, snoopy, bitchy man who sees with sharp eyes and succeeds in making voyeurs of us all.” These, she made clear, were all qualities that pleased her in a writer.
Nonetheless, Ephron did not collect a lot of these early pieces, and reading them against her other work one suspects the problem, usually, was that the editor assigned her a banal subject. In 1969, she wrote the piece “Where Bookmen Meet to Eat” for the New York Times chronicling the easy-to-parody subject of the long publishing lunches to which agents, book editors, and writers are prone. The piece goes over the subject with a delicate hand, even though at the end Ephron manages to convince one agent to admit that “lunch is two hours out there in the world that could be spent returning telephone calls.”
Of course, she had to be careful to preserve her own ability to make a living. In interviews from and after that period she describes herself as having just enough to live on, no more than ten thousand dollars a year before 1974. Ephron, like Sontag before her, wrote for women’s magazines for money, especially Cosmopolitan. These pieces were not always enjoyable to write, because, as she put it, they could not be done at the “intellectual level that is most satisfying to me as a writer.” There is some reason to suspect they were also the pieces that drove her toward the women’s movement, out of sheer frustration with the work she was getting, especially from Helen Gurley Brown. The opportunities there were what you’d expect: articles about makeovers, travel, sex, Copacabana showgirls.
But Gurley Brown did let Ephron do one thing that broke out of Cosmopolitan’s usual peppy mold. Perhaps feeling hurt by how the fashion tabloid Women’s Wear Daily had frequently written about her—it often chronicled Gurley Brown’s career as a magazine editor in less than flattering terms—she allowed Ephron to write about it. Ephron laid waste to its editorial pretensions. It was a gossip rag, she wrote, targeting a narrow audience called “The Ladies,” whose pampered lives she mercilessly pilloried: “There was something a little embarrassing about just doing nothing and having lunch in between.” She said the magazine was a “surrogate bitch,” a kind of excuse to make fun of the appearance of the famous while calling it journalism.
Ephron was taking down the magazine in its own style: its habit of adopting a confiding, giggling persona to cover up the undermining remarks it made about professional women, about the way they looked and the way they dated and the way they managed their professional affairs. Women’s Wear Daily, not noticing the ironic resemblance in tone and style, threatened to sue, Ephron wrote later.
But—and perhaps Helen Gurley Brown should have seen this coming—in writing for Cosmopolitan she was also gathering material on the magazine itself, and more specifically its editor. Ephron’s writings had caught the eye of the editors at Esquire. The first Ephron piece they ever published was a profile of Gurley Brown, one that sought to highlight her worst personality traits. In the profile, Ephron takes the view that Gurley Brown’s problem was not her bad habit of crying when confronted with criticism, nor was it the potential corruption of morals her critics often identified when she advised young women, for example, to date married men. Instead, she went after her former editor for something that perhaps only a former writer for the magazine could see so clearly: the way Gurley Brown insulted the intelligence of women, generally:
She is demonstrating, rather forcefully, that there are well over a million women who are willing to spend sixty cents to read not about politics, not about the female liberation movement, not about the war in Vietnam, but merely about how to get a man.
This argument bears some resemblance to Didion’s view of Helen Gurley Brown. Didion complained in her article about the vulgarity of a popular magazine editor who wants to be “the little princess, the woman who has fulfilled the whispered promise of her own books and of all the advertisements, the girl to whom things happen.” But Ephron didn’t write from the standpoint of a superior, disdainful mind; she understood, in a way Didion did not, the appeal of this frivolity. She therefore came at Gurley Brown from a more democratic place. She admitted she was among Cosmopolitan’s readers and writers. “How can you be angry at someone who’s got your number?” Ephron asked. The sympathy was initially lost on Gurley Brown. She hated the article and especially the picture printed with it, but within a few days forgave Ephron.
The next targets of Ephron’s ire were Erich Segal, the Yale classics professor who had written the bestselling novel Love Story, and the poet Rod McKuen. Ephron professed herself a lover of trash, and particularly the novels of Jacqueline Susann. “I have never believed that kitsch killed,” she averred. But she could not abide Segal’s and McKuen’s sentimentality. She also could not abide their public personas, especially Segal’s. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was competing with Segal for a space on the bestseller lists at the time, and Segal made a habit of giving speeches condemning Roth’s graphic depictions of sex. (Perhaps unusually for a trashy book, Love Story has no sex scenes at all.) Ephron looked on in disbelief:
Everyone loves Erich’s speech. Everyone, that is, but Pauline Kael, the film critic, who heard an earlier version of Erich’s speech at a book-and-author luncheon in Richmond, Virginia, and told him afterward that he was knocking freedom of speech and sucking up to his audience. To which Erich replied, “We’re here to sell books, aren’t we?”
This ability to speak from inside a wide phenomenon, to know how it catered to and tricked the basest aspects of one’s personality, and then to be able to criticize it from the perspective of an insider would make Ephron a better chronicler of the 1970s—and especially the women’s movement—than just about anyone else. She was inside and outside at once, a detached person who was always in the middle of it all. She had a perceptive gift, and it was best put to use in those years. Of course, Ephron’s fame as a filmmaker would eclipse almost all her work as a writer. But it was her writing that left the indelible mark of her actual personality, her capacity to size people up and, when they really needed it, cut them down with aplomb. It made her the kind of friend people were proud to have, eager to please, and mildly afraid of. And it made this early work of hers all very brilliant.
For most of her career, Ephron wrote in the first person and all her life, because of her early training as a reporter, she felt a little dirty doing it. Originally, she needed to be prodded by her editors, having been trained at the Post not to make herself the story. But when she came to collect her early pieces in a book called Wallflower at the Orgy, in 1970, she confessed she had chafed somewhat at the restriction.
There are times when I am seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to blurt out, in the middle of interviews, “Me! Me! Me! Enough about you. What about me?”
Years later, after she had been interviewed six ways from Sunday as a truly famous person, this bit of youthful vanity would embarrass her. But no piece offered so complete a sense of Ephron herself, of her voice and her perspective, as the article she would write in 1972 for Esquire, “A Few Words About Breasts.”
The subject demands an observation: Ephron was unusually flat chested. Apparently it ran in the family; she records her caustic mother, upon being asked by her daughters to purchase a first bra, saying: “Why not use a Band-Aid instead?”
Women engaged in a continuous game of “competitive remarks made about breast size,” Ephron wrote. She confessed to having obsessed over the subject, an obsession that extended to purchasing the kind of snake-oil bust enhancement systems that were everywhere in the seventies and eighties. A college boyfriend’s mother implied to her, in conversation, that she would never be able to satisfy sexually because of this disability. Ephron ended on a note that would become her signature move: a consideration of all the alternative arguments against her experience, the people who insisted that smaller breasts actually made clothes fit better, occasioned less teasing. This was a gesture at the objectivity of journalism, something Ephron said she never believed in, even before she was afraid to write completely from the “I.” And then she punctured it all:
I have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of shit.
It may mean something that this article, published in the May 1972 Esquire, was the first thing Ephron published after her mother’s death. It brought in mail to the magazine.
After the piece about her breasts, Esquire offered Ephron a column. Over the years, conflicting things were said about whether it was Ephron’s idea or the magazine editors’ that the column should focus on women. Whoever can take the full credit, it was an excellent match.
Ephron had already been into the women’s movement for some time when she began writing, which meant she had already gathered a fair number of observations. Her first column explored a question that haunts the writings of nearly every feminist, though few at the time were willing to say it out loud: would the feminist revolution spark a change in the way men and women sexually fantasized about each other? Ephron still had enough dignity, she thought, to avoid saying precisely what her own fantasies were, but they involved domination, and she knew already that feminists were not meant to want to be dominated in sex with men. She left the column open-ended, not having any real answer, but offered a self-conscious final paragraph:
Writing a column on women in Esquire is, I realize, a little like telling a Jewish joke to a bunch of Irish Catholics. The criticisms I may make of the movement will seem doubly disloyal; the humor I hope to bring to the subject will seem flippant in this context.
Ephron was indeed wading into enemy territory, at least to a degree. The Esquire of the time was less celebrity-driven than it is now, and considered itself more of a literary magazine than a fashion one. But Ephron’s columns were unique. She was not, like Sontag and Didion, viewing the movement from a distance, criticizing it in the abstract. Neither was she plunging headlong into it, in the sense that she did not so much see her columns as an effort to endorse any platforms.
The first hit she landed was on another writer, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the popular novel Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen. The book was a bestseller in its time, opening with the main character’s account of being raped by her first husband. It turns from there to its real subject: the perils of beauty in a male-dominated culture: “If I could know for sure I was still beautiful, I thought, it would be easy to leave.” Shulman went on to claim that in fact beautiful people had just as many problems as ugly people, only different ones. She used, among others, Marilyn Monroe as an example of beautiful suffering.
Ephron, having never been considered much of a beauty, found this line of argument hard to take. “There isn’t an ugly girl in America who wouldn’t exchange her problems for the problems of being beautiful,” she insisted, including herself:
“They say it’s worse to be ugly,” Alix Shulman writes. Yes, they do say that. And they’re right. It’s also worse to be poor, worse to be orphaned, worse to be fat. Not just different from rich, familied and thin—actually worse.
This piece thus punctured a line that had been quite popular within the women’s movement itself, where Shulman was an established figure who had published in Ms. magazine the marriage contract she’d made with her husband, in which every domestic task imaginable was enumerated and allocated to each party in the marriage. No one else took her to task in quite this way, though Didion had offered Shulman’s marriage contract as evidence of the growing obsession with trivial matters in the women’s movement. But Ephron was not using Shulman as a reason to reject the whole; in fact, she tried to end this ripper of a piece on a slightly more sympathetic note. She was being unfair to Shulman, she said, and even to the movement. “I’m working on it,” she said. “Like all things about liberation, sisterhood is difficult.”
Sisterhood Is Difficult could have been an alternative title for the collection of these columns. (Ephron went instead with Crazy Salad when she published it in 1975.) The fact was that most of the essays see Ephron struggling to describe the movement—not the principles underlying feminism, but the way they were being articulated by actual women out in the world—in happy terms. One column was spent reporting from the 1972 Miami Democratic Convention, where Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were butting heads. The goal of feminist activists at the convention was to get some concessions on the Democratic party platform, but instead, as Ephron watched, they managed to get very little done beyond infighting. What was happening wasn’t pretty, and Ephron had to describe it, especially Friedan’s anger at the way a younger generation was sidelining her:
It’s her baby, damn it. Her movement. Is she supposed to sit still and let a beautiful thin lady run off with it?
Gloria Steinem, then at the height of her media visibility as an actual feminist leader, did not come off much better when seen through Ephron’s lens. Though she was more high-handed than Friedan, she had friends who did the dirty work for her. And when Steinem was left behind by George McGovern, who had made her certain promises about the Democratic party platform, she cried about it. Ephron is not so much critical of Steinem’s crying—as she was of Helen Gurley Brown’s—as she is mystified by the occasion for it. “I have never cried over anything remotely political in my life, and I honestly have no idea what to say.”
Ephron told an interviewer that this bit of reporting—her simple mention of Steinem’s tears—got her friends “yelling and screaming at me.” Some of them were angry for years.
Yet for most, Ephron’s sympathetic but skeptical tone worked well. We have a habit, now, of assuming that people had only one kind of reaction to the women’s movement: either they were all in, or they were all out. But the second wave was not, as its critics like Didion sometimes framed it, a united front. Its internal politics were fractious, with arguments about the way age and race and any number of other intrafeminine fault lines inflected this business of “being a woman.” Any real person, looking at all that, had to have a conflicted take on it all. It was possible to feel extreme, uncontrollable surges of hope and disappointment.
All those conflicted feelings are perhaps what made Ephron such a resonant spokesperson about all of it: she could be cutting about the movement’s absurdities and ugliness, but she was doing so from the position of an insider. And though she was gentle, occasionally she would offer corrections to the elisions of the critics. In one column, she distinguished herself from Didion’s insistence that life as a woman would involve “blood, birth and death,” a definition she called “extraordinary and puzzling.” Didion and Ephron had, by then, become friendly, as they ran in all the same circles. Perhaps Ephron was a good influence. Asked about her position on the women’s movement in the 1990s, Didion seemed to retract her earlier critique.
I think that piece was about a specific moment in time. I thought the women’s movement was becoming mired in the trivial, that it was going in a direction that wasn’t the ideal direction, that it had hit a wall and kept talking about small things. Trivialization wore itself out, though, and the movement managed to survive, not so much as a movement anymore, but as a changed way of life.
Ephron obviously had had no problem talking about women’s bodies; there was, after all, the article about breasts. She had also written, in early 1973, a long investigative piece called “Dealing with the uh, Problem,” which had gamely explored the manufacturing, use, and marketing of the feminine odor spray—i.e., “a deodorant for the external genital area (or, more exactly, the external perineal area).” Her detachment suited her well here, for with very little editorializing she managed to make the whole business seem so ridiculous.
It was easy to write about the ridiculous things men said and did to women, harder to write about the ridiculous things women did to themselves. She found herself arguing one day with Susan Brownmiller about wearing makeup. The divisions in the movement were terribly apparent by that point, and she had worked the experience into the Shulman piece, without attaching a name:
Once I tried to explain to a fellow feminist why I liked wearing makeup; she replied by explaining why she does not. Neither of us understood a word the other said.
One column wrestled directly with this alternating enthusiasm for and ambivalence about the movement. She found it difficult to be at once committed to it and to be a writer. One of the “recurring ironies of this movement is that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.” She found it difficult she said, to review books by women about the second-wave feminist movement because although she agreed with their passions, she didn’t really like the way those women wrote. She knew she was supposed to count their good intentions into the final critical calculus, of course:
This is what’s known in the women’s movement as sisterhood, and it is good politics, I suppose, but it is not good criticism. Or honesty. Or the truth. (Furthermore, it is every bit as condescending as the sort of criticism men apply to books about women these days—that unconsciously patronizing tone that treats books by and about women as some sort of sub-genre of literature, outside the mainstream, not quite relevant, interesting really, how-these-women-dogo-on-and-we-really-must-try-to-understand-what-theyare-getting-at-whatever-it-is.)
There was, of course, something of self-criticism in this, for there was something ultimately sort of patronizing about Esquire sectioning off its analysis of women from the rest of the magazine, too, not to mention that the magazine targeted men as its readers and did not have nearly as wide a circulation among women. And something was ultimately wasteful about keeping Ephron writing only about that. Later she’d say it was her decision to quit writing the columns, that she’d grown tired of it, said what she needed to say.
But the subject continued to provide her with copy for some time after that. She was poached by New York magazine. There she was to keep writing pieces about women. In the first of those, she attacked a friend, the writer Sally Quinn, for saying she had always used flirting as a reporting technique. And in analyzing her anger over Quinn’s remark, Ephron mentioned what a recent interviewee, and growing friend, had to say about the matter of women and professional competition:
“Dashiell Hammett used to say I had the meanest jealousy of all,” Miss [Lillian] Hellman said. “I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn’t know how to do it.”
For New York Ephron began to return to an older form for her: the simple takedown of prominent media figures. Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, decided to launch a magazine for women called Viva in 1973, with the tagline: “Brought to you by men who unashamedly enjoy women.” In the column you can practically see Ephron’s excitement as she gets to lay bare the particular contours of Guccione’s ignorance, quoting him at length and without comment just as she had done to Dick Cavett and Helen Gurley Brown:
As near as possible, everything considered, I hate to say it but I think it’s true, I know women better than women know themselves.
Viva would last seven years after this, but it would not become the kind of emblematic publication that women cited to each other, contrary to Guccione’s dreams and hopes.
The next person Ephron went after was Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who Ephron found to be a phony. In the aftermath of Watergate, attractive Julie tended to be the person the Nixons put in front of the press. The Washington press corps, as Ephron chronicles, was practically in love with her.
As one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying. They will tell you she is approachable, which is true, and that she is open, which is not … It is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.
This statement may have some personal bite in it, because once Phoebe Ephron was dead, Henry Ephron had become the burden of his daughters. He began to write a memoir he called We Thought We Could Do Anything, a title he took directly from the eulogy his daughter had given for her mother. Ephron later insisted the memoir was full of nonsense. Moreover, it seemed like a naked attempt to capitalize on the growing fame of his eldest daughter, which must have bothered her.
Nora Ephron was by now famous. She was appearing in the society gossip rag she’d excoriated years before, Women’s Wear Daily, quite frequently—more frequently even than Helen Gurley Brown had. She was on television often. On one show, the host brought up the way she often cut people to the quick.
Host: You can be malevolent, can’t you?
Ephron: Oh, sure.
Host: It’s kind of fun to be malevolent, isn’t it?
Ephron: No, you’re—
Host: I’ll tell you something you were malevolent in.
Your piece on Julie Nixon.
Ephron: You have a soft spot for Julie Nixon.
Host: I like Julie, yes.
Ephron: Well, I don’t. I think she’s a chocolate-covered spider.
This was the frame that almost all Ephron’s subsequent pieces would take. At some point she’d return to Esquire, where instead of women her targets became the media, and many individuals she knew in the media: People magazine, Theodore White, the pretensions of certain New Yorker writers. (She didn’t mention Kael in that piece.) At one point, caught up in a dispute Esquire had with the writer Richard Goodwin, she even hit back at Esquire. She wrote a column criticizing its decision to settle with Goodwin over a profile of him she had edited for the magazine.
This aspect of Ephron’s life—what some have called her meanness—seems not to have been totally apparent to readers at the time. It was sometimes not even apparent to Ephron herself. Interviewed by the Associated Press when Crazy Salad was published in 1975, Ephron said:
You can write the most wonderful piece in the world about someone and the only word they’ll see is “plump” … You learn very early that you’re not in this business to be friends with the people you write about. If you are, you start pulling punches.
The dilemma she articulated here was one she felt acutely in her own writing. By the time Ephron was a household name, the men occasionally appeared to be sniping back at her in columns, calling her brainy and cute instead of brilliant, opining on how much they’d like to sleep with her. She saw that this affected what she was asked to write and what she was asked to think about in her career as an essayist. She told an interviewer in 1974 that “there are certain magazines that will not assign pieces to women or even think of women in connection with certain subjects such as economics or politics.”
“Being single is a distraction,” a freshly divorced Nora Ephron also said to that interviewer in 1974. (She was briefly married to another humor writer, Dan Greenburg, in the early 1970s.) “I mean one of the things about marriage that is good for both men and women is that it frees you from all that energy that you use to put into dating. You can put it into work. You don’t have to worry about who is going to take you to the dinner party tomorrow. It takes time to be single, it seems to me.” Bernstein ended that.
For whatever reason, Ephron’s connection with Bernstein happened at the same time as a sudden decline in her interest in writing for magazines. In fact, her writing dropped off almost entirely in the latter half of the 1970s, as she turned her attention to screenplays. She began collaborating with Alice Arlen on Silkwood, and after what was apparently a somewhat rocky courtship, she married Carl Bernstein. “We decided to get married on Sunday, we got married on Wednesday, and the perfect part was that we made the decision to get married while we were on the Eastern shuttle,” she said to an interviewer. But she also told him that “the test of whether a marriage works is not necessarily whether it lasts forever.”
As we know from Heartburn, it didn’t last forever. “I’m terrible about making stuff up,” she’d say when interviewers asked if she had any intentions of writing fiction. But she also said that from the moment she left her second husband she kind of knew she would write about the experience. The husband of the woman Bernstein had been cheating with—his name was Peter—asked her to lunch:
We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh, Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”
“It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”
I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.
Ephron said she eventually realized that the thing her mother had repeated throughout her life, “Everything is copy,” was a matter of control:
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.
I think that’s what she meant.
Heartburn became a giant bestseller, making Ephron rich. She wrote the screenplay for the film version, to be directed by her friend Mike Nichols. Bernstein was, by all accounts, furious. He made it a condition of their divorce that the film not portray him as anything other than a loving father. Some of her friends apparently thought the move in bad taste too; in a gossipy New York magazine article that came out just before the novel appeared, her first husband, Dan Greenburg, told the reporter: “Nora is a much classier person and a much better writer than is evident in this book.”
The book has become a kind of legend now, notwithstanding the fact the movie never quite lived up to the cleverness of the novel, perhaps because Bernstein imposed conditions on the adaptation for the sake of the couple’s two children, and perhaps because a movie cannot easily replicate the consciousness of one funny narrator the way a novel can. Too much was dependent on the Rachel character sounding just like Nora, having the same gimlet-eyed way of looking at the world and at her situation, and that interiority was too hard for even Meryl Streep to pull off on-screen. But it was one of the great pop acts of feminist revenge, one that not all the treacly films Ephron would make in her late career could quite gloss over.