“Who do you work for—her or me?”
I have five thousand “friends” on Facebook, but not really—I actually know just a few hundred of them. And I could say I was Nora Ephron’s “friend” from 1974 to 1982, but I was really just a friend-once-removed—for a few of those years, I was living with a writer who had been dating Carl Bernstein when he met Nora, and Carl, never strong on the one man/one woman thing, asked Nora for dinner, so Nora called her friend and asked if it would be okay for her to go out with Carl, and it was, which cleared the path for the debacle that was Nora and Carl’s marriage and the romance that put me in Nora’s orbit.
I wrote a piece for Nora at Esquire. I was in the horse-drawn carriage Carl commandeered and overturned after a drunken dinner at Le Cirque. And when Nora left Carl—as any wife might if her husband had an affair while she was pregnant—we both lived in the Apthorp, the baronial apartment building on the Upper West Side. So, okay, “friends.” In the specific, situational, Manhattan meaning of the word.
And then Nora wrote Heartburn, a novel about a Washington-based political journalist who has an affair while his wife is pregnant.
The idea to do a piece about Nora’s intensely autobiographical novel was a no-brainer: I’d toss some questions to my friend, and she’d hit two thousand words over the fence. I could have placed that Q&A anywhere, but I was a contract writer at New York magazine in that decade, so I pitched it to Ed Kosner, who assigned it. And then I called Nora.
Nora said she would only be doing interviews in the cities she toured, and then only on the day she was in those cities—there would be no previews of the book, no glossy press. And then she delivered the line that chilled: “I forbid you to do this piece.”
Ed Kosner’s reaction: “Who do you work for—her or me?”
Gee, now that he put it that way . . .
I called Nora. I said I was doing the piece and that I’d tell everyone that she had declined to be interviewed.
We never spoke again.
“Scenes from a Marriage” was published in March 1983. It presented a Nora Ephron radically different from the charmingly opinionated survivor in her book—I’d interviewed many of her friends, and, to my surprise, they’d not only failed to kiss the ring, some had expressed astonishment at the mere existence of Heartburn. (As it happened, my story wasn’t the worst for Nora. Leon Wieseltier, writing under the pseudonym Tristan Vox, took on the morality of the book in Vanity Fair. “Here is Carl Bernstein and adultery; there is Nora Ephron and child abuse,” Wieseltier wrote. “It is no contest.”)
I didn’t see Nora for twenty years. Then, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2004, she turned a corner and there I was. It was a movie moment. She didn’t gasp, but close. Clearly there was no statute of limitations on the crime I’d committed against her.
Nora Ephron died in 2012. But for her legion of fans, she’s astonishingly present, eternally alive in her writing and her movies. Why, just the other week I read a piece that asked, “What would Nora do?”
Good question. What would Nora do if, by the magic of literary conjuring, she were yanked back from the beyond to have lunch with me? She wouldn’t be pleased by her companion. But as even her friends will admit, Nora was one of the greatest control freaks on the planet—who but Nora would, in her terminal year, have the presence of mind to befriend the new “It” girl, Lena Dunham, knowing that she could place her account of their friendship in The New Yorker. She might loathe me, but she’d use me to burnish the identity she’d brilliantly created: accessible icon, chatty neighbor, career romantic.
What could I ask that would get her to go beyond the quips and opinions that made her name? How could I make our lunch matter? More to the point, why did I want it to? Why couldn’t I, as I hoped to do three decades ago, serve up questions she could easily hit out of the park?
My method as an interviewer is to read everything and write a hundred questions—and then throw all that away and play the moment. But as I walked into Michael’s, the media lunchroom, gloom descended. In the cosmic pecking order, I realized, nothing had changed. We’d be as we were: Nora, born to the A-list, eternally confident, and me, a nail-biter, B-list to the core.
Ah, there she was, seated at a good table in the front room of the restaurant, like a Dickens ghost, seen only by me. In a lovely memory piece, her son Jacob described her uniform: “Chanel flats and her cream-colored pants and her black-and-white-striped blouse.” That is exactly how she looked. Unchanged.
“This is . . . beyond amazing,” I said. “You look great.”
“You couldn’t think of anyone else?”
“Like someone from history?
“I hear Michelangelo was a fascinating guy.”
“I thought of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, but the deal was that I had to have actually known the person, and you and I had unfinished business, so . . .”
“I died, Jesse. Our business couldn’t be more finished.”
“For you.”
“Oh, dear. You want to unwind the clock, make it right?”
Whatever I’d had in mind, this wasn’t it. Nora had turned the tables. She was interviewing me.
“In the sixties, I was a ferocious journalist, fearless, confrontational, exciting to read. In the seventies, I lost my nerve. I trimmed my outrage, I wrote nice profiles. And then you came along. I had to do the piece, but it didn’t have to be so . . . honest.”
“Oh, is that what it was?”
“You lived it; I wrote it down. After, I remembered that was what good journalism is. And for the next few decades, that’s how I wrote. So . . . I owe you.”
“I’m happy to have helped,” she said, though by the way she delivered the line, I wasn’t so sure.
“I’m curious: What was it like for you to read that piece?”
“I didn’t read it.”
“Bullshit.”
“I cried.”
“Why?”
“You caught me in the act.”
“Writing it, I thought: This woman is as scared and insecure as I am.”
“Or more. I had two small children, and . . .” She caught herself. “Your life worked out. And you’re still living it.”
“Jealous?”
“You cannot imagine.”
“What’s it like . . . over there?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“I can’t. Words are inadequate.”
Imagine that: a description of eternity eludes a writer who had something to say about everything.
“Forgive me?”
I didn’t mean to ask that, but as soon as I did, I knew this was why I’d wanted this conversation with Nora. All these years later, I still felt her power, still hoped for her approval.
“Death is nothing but forgiveness.”
There’s a moment in a conversation when the exchanges aren’t strategic or social, a moment when two people are, simply and sincerely, saying what they believe to be true. Was this that moment? Was there more to say?
I felt a spectral presence behind me. Nora brightened. My ability to see the dead extended only a few feet, so it wasn’t until the presence was standing directly beside me that I recognized him: Mike Nichols, looking as suave as ever.
“Just a minute, Mike,” Nora said, and I realized that she and Mike often had lunch at Michael’s, and our conversation, this once-in-a-lifetime communication with the dead, was far more important to me than it was to Nora. For me, she was a window into eternity; for her, I was a chore. Ms. Ephron simply didn’t dwell on unhappiness.
I pushed back my chair, stepped aside for Mike Nichols. Nothing, really, had changed. Nora got the last word. Nobody got the last laugh.
Jesse Kornbluth has been a journalist (Vanity Fair, New York magazine) and an internet executive (Editorial Director of America Online). He is now a novelist and screenwriter (Married Sex), a playwright (The Color of Light), and a cultural concierge (HeadButler.com). He lives in New York.