27
It’s Mine
Nora Ephron loved butter. Almost everyone at her memorial service spoke about her love of butter. Their speeches were savored, like butter. Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Meryl Streep, and other entertainers and artists I’d looked up to spoke so brightly and lightly, with such wit and intelligence, that it seemed Nora had written their material. She planned her service while she was in the hospital—what music would play and who would speak and in what order. I thought maybe she’d given everyone direction, something like: Be butter. “Don’t be better, just be butter.” My favorite note I ever got from Nora was “Just be funny,” which is why I was thinking that. The butter-talk spread its richness naturally into a creamy love and appreciation of the ingredient that savors everything it puts itself in and onto. It’s too rich for words, for words like mine.
The memorial was at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. To the right and left of the stage were two enormous planters filled with white-bloomed flowers—the structures towered well over ten feet high. Her name appeared in an elegant font written on the screen as the song “As Time Goes By” played.
Earlier that week, I’d had a dream that Nora and I were backstage before a show, hanging out in front of the dressing room makeup mirror. I reached into her makeup bag and found some blue eyeliner and put it on. We were standing up and we smiled at each other. I thought of taking the makeup pencil at a moment when she wasn’t looking. If I took it, I wouldn’t be able to come backstage to see her after the show so I could borrow it.
The dream made me think of Mildred, because I wanted to share it with her. Nora had seen Mildred during her Heartburn years—the scandalous book about her former husband Carl Bernstein and the affair he had while she was seven months pregnant. The book was her revenge, and I’ll never forget her smile when I asked if the revenge had been sweet. It was a smile that said it had been. Mildred and her husband, Bernie Berkowitz, led a therapy group in their offices on West Ninth Street, off of Fifth Avenue, where Lynn Grossman was also “in group” with Nora. In fact, it was Lynn’s husband, Bob Balaban, who connected me with Mildred.
We’d wrapped Waiting for Guffman and were doing Bill Maher’s show (at the time it was called Politically Incorrect) and it was there, backstage, that he’d asked how I was. It wasn’t a casual question but one to consider truthfully. Bob is someone I’d describe as “directly human.” I hadn’t been doing well and had found myself zoning out in my apartment, holding a pile of dirty laundry and not moving. I told him I was doing alright, but it wasn’t the truth and he knew it. And then he asked, “How are you handling your success?” I was taken aback and answered, “Is that what this is? Not very well.” He gave me Mildred’s number and I went to see her.
Mildred Newman was an archetypal “great mother.” She was playfully nurturing and imaginatively simple. She’d say, “Your world is not so big as to make yourself so small, nor is your world so small as to make yourself so big,” and I’d think of Alice in Wonderland, who made herself both big and small, and the rabbit holes she got herself into. When I was in a state with a boyfriend, Mildred would say: “You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss / A sigh is just a sigh / The fundamental things apply / As time goes by.” She’d also say, “There are two parts to feelings: having them, and acting on them.” I would still sink in my feelings then, afraid to navigate in order to get out of them. The battery low, my flashlight flickering. She’d say, “Do what you approve of.” And like Jiminy Cricket says to Pinocchio, “Always let your conscience be your guide.”
I met Nora before Dazed and Confused and she cast me in a little part in Sleepless in Seattle that got cut from the film. Afterward she wrote me a letter on her stationery, explaining that it had nothing to do with me, but the scene just didn’t move the story along. In the scene, I knocked on Tom Hanks’s door after hearing him on the radio, let loose a gush of fandom, and made a quick exit. In the letter, she said I was a gifted comedienne and that she would work with me again, which I felt was genuine, and her support meant everything. And besides, it’s not like Sleepless in Seattle did any big business, so I wasn’t that upset about it.
The next year, she hired me for a movie she was working on called Mixed Nuts. I was cast as Rollerblader #2 and Jon Stewart was cast as Rollerblader #1. So Jon and I learned how to Rollerblade at the Roxy, which was a nightclub in the Meatpacking District. On Sunday afternoons it turned into a roller rink, where we Rollerbladed to disco—looking like dorks in our helmets, wrist guards, and kneepads.
We shot Mixed Nuts in Santa Monica, in the newly opened Shutters on the Beach, a gorgeous hotel right on the water where we had to stay for three weeks. We couldn’t believe that we had it so good, and we didn’t share more than fifteen lines in the film between us. We pretty much just had to Rollerblade past Steve Martin holding a Christmas tree. Now that I think of it, we didn’t even do that, because our stunt doubles did it for us.
I gave Shutters my credit card to check into the place and Jon and I went out for burgers close by. When I went to the ATM to get some cash, all I had was $1.75 left in my bank account. My credit card was also my cash card and I shuddered. Nora happened to be walking by, and I showed her the receipt, like it belonged to someone else. She got her wallet out and gave me a hundred dollars.
A dollar seventy-five in my bank account, isn’t that too much? It doesn’t make sense, right? But all those independent movies I did in the nineties were done on the cheap. I was counting coins, which I’d put in those paper roll-ups to take to the deli in exchange for cash. I would buy pasta to make for dinner. I didn’t know anyone else who was famous and broke.
Jon Stewart was so funny. I wonder if people know just how funny he is. On the record, I’m saying that he’s not only funny, but he’s fun. The layout of the rooms at Shutters made the beds super entertaining for us—but not how you’re thinking. You could take a bath and open the shutters to see the bed, just a few feet away, or you could close the shutters for privacy. No, Jon wasn’t there when I took a bath. After housekeeping cleaned the rooms and tightened the beds to the utmost, we’d team up. We’d start at the toilet, then run, stepping on the bath’s ledges, and fly, like Superman, through the open shutters—plummeting across the bed and sliding off the edge. We were like daredevils all of a sudden, since now we knew how to Rollerblade and it’s clear to anyone we were Method actors.
You know who else is funny and fun? Jimmy Fallon. He has his own TV show now. He was a rising star when I met him, just starting on SNL and all of twenty-six years old. I was about to hit thirty and had completed Best in Show in November. I still had braces but was waiting to take them off until after the new millennium. I don’t remember the reason why exactly, except that time was speeding up and I didn’t want it to. I wanted to shake off the character of Meg as well as time-travel back to the eighth grade, which was the last time I had braces. I wanted things to be new and blushing.
For New Year’s Eve, Jimmy and I went to his parents’ house to bang pots and pans while walking up and down the street, which was Fallon tradition. The house was full of guests, friends of Jimmy and his sister, Gloria. It was like Animal House, but instead of frat brothers, the house was full of people resembling elves, much like the Keebler cookie family. There was so much laughing that it seemed like everyone was on mushrooms. I remember we visited someone’s home whose bathroom was chock-full of Santa Claus decorations: a Santa cozy on the toilet paper, Santa towels and hand towels, Mrs. Claus by the toothbrush holder, Santa shower curtain, Santa bath mat. I’d meet Jimmy late, after his SNL stuff, to go out dancing. He’s probably the best dancer that has ever lived.
I was still anxious about my fame and success, and was only really happy when I had a fiction to carry around. Back then, there was no media in being social, so long phone calls were fun—as was going out. I remember seeing Nora around this time, and she said to me, “You know, Parker, you will always feel the same. You will just keep getting older.” That was stunning news to me, since I’d had this fantasy that after I turned thirty, I’d become Mariska Hargitay, or another womanly-type woman, instead of the impish woman-child I’ll remain forever. I’d always feel the same, and I’d never exactly fit in. Now that I’m older, I accept myself and realize it’s okay to be different—and also okay that a ball gown makes me feel like I got lost in a swath of someone else’s curtains that got twisted around my body unsuccessfully. I never wanted to feel like a trophy of myself because if I did, I supposed I’d feel as if I won something. And if I won something, I might lose my desire to do what I do. I may just knock myself off the pedestal. Winning is lonely. It means more people will talk behind your back. And if they’re talking behind your back, then they’re more likely to have knives to throw at your back.
I would love some coffee, how wonderful.
Mildred told me this story over and over again: “When Bernie and I, when our book came out . . .” Mildred and her husband, Bernie, wrote How to Be Your Own Best Friend, which came out in the early seventies and was the first self-help book ever written, or one of them. “When Bernie and I, when our book came out,” she’d say again, “we had lots of success with it. We were famous for it.” She’d smile, beaming, and I’d eat some of her tuna fish salad from the 2nd Ave Deli that she’d serve me on stone-ground crackers. She enjoyed this story every time she told it, like a grandmother telling a bedtime story—she took her time, taking you into it. “There was a party for the book, and lots of people came, my patients over the years . . .” Like Neil Simon, Erica Jong, Richard Benjamin . . . “I was in the kitchen and this woman, a friend, came up to me and said, ‘You know, you and Bernie have everything. A great marriage and famous patients and now this book . . .’” Mildred would huff with frustration, imitating her. “‘And I can’t stand it!’” Shaking off her portrayal of this woman, Mildred would shift in her chair, aggravated, shaking her head. She’d pause for the aggravation to leave her. “And then this woman said, ‘I want what you have.’” At which point Mildred would take a deep breath of astonishment and collect herself, as if she were still in the moment. “And I looked her right in the eyes”—and then she’d hold my gaze, lowering her voice for her punch line—“and I said, ‘You can’t have it. It’s MINE.’” She’d penetrate her gaze at me and through me. She’d then lean back and slowly smile—and we’d sit there.
Once, after a breakup I couldn’t get over (the guy married a girlfriend of mine soon after), Mildred said, “I want you to put him in front of you, and I want you to chop his head off with an ax.”
