This is the way it began:
I had come to the Washington Post on June 17, 1968, and was assigned a desk right in front of Carl Bernstein. He was a District kid, born in Washington and raised mostly in the Maryland suburbs, but he had this New York air about him. We hit it off. It was the Vietnam War era, and Carl, as an alternative to the draft, was heading off to the army, about to do his six months of active duty as a member of the D.C. National Guard. I had already done my stint in the New York National Guard, and so I wrote him a memo on what to expect in basic training and how to game the system. For instance, I told him that rubbing a lead pencil over the rust spots on a rifle will make it look like it had been thoroughly cleaned. Carl was impressed and we became friends, best friends actually.
Carl was married to another Post reporter, Carol Honsa. I was married to Barbara Stubbs, whom I had met at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and who had become an editor at the Washington Star, then still an important afternoon newspaper. We two couples spent a lot of time together.
The Bernstein-Honsa marriage did not last, although the Bernstein-Cohen friendship did. So I was ringside, so to speak, as Carl went from being just another reporter at the Washington Post to being a monster celebrity who, with Bob Woodward, was credited with bringing down the Nixon administration. I went along for the ride. By day, I was parked in Annapolis covering the Maryland State House. At night, I was a friend of Woodward’s and Bernstein’s.
This was 1973. The burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s offices had taken place in June of 1972. Within a year, Washington was transformed. The burgeoning scandal—so big it would bring down the president and produce the indictment or jailing of an astounding forty-three government officials—had made Washington into something it had never been: a capital city in the European mode. It was no longer just the seat of government, but a magnet for writers, filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, and itinerant intellectuals from all over the world. They descended on Washington and sooner or later ambled up to the vast newsroom of the Washington Post. Always, they sought out Woodward and Bernstein or the paper’s editor, the astonishingly cinematic Benjamin C. Bradlee. I was there, attached to Carl and Bob like a barnacle on a ship.
One night at a Washington restaurant I had dinner with the founder and editor of New York magazine, Clay Felker, and one of his associate editors, the former Washington Post reporter Aaron Latham. Felker wanted to start a new magazine and Latham wanted me to write for it. It would be called Couples, and it would cover the new and varied ways men and women—it was only men and women at the time—coupled. Because my wife worked for the competing newspaper, I got assigned to do a story about spouses or partners who competed with each other. One of those couples was the Greenburgs—Dan Greenburg, a famous humorist, and his younger wife, Nora Ephron.
Dan was a hugely successful writer. In 1964, he had published How to Be a Jewish Mother, which became a number-one best seller. The book, his magazine articles, and even some plays gave him the kind of fame and income few writers achieve. In 1967 he was among the literary and intellectual elite invited to the Playboy Magazine Writers Conference. It was a stellar collection of writers and intellectuals and those who were both. Normal Mailer was there. Gore Vidal was there. Gay Talese was there, and so was Arthur Schlesinger and Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut and Calvin Trillin—so many literary celebrities that the magazine got precisely the kind of publicity it sought and Hugh Heffner, its founder and owner, was transformed from a Peeping Tom into a patron of the arts—a regular Maxwell Perkins. Nora was there as well, but she is not mentioned in any of the newspaper stories or present in the group photos. She was—maybe for the last time in her life—a mere spouse.
By 1973, Dan and Nora were beginning to switch places. Nora was obscure no more. In fact, in certain circles—literary and journalist Manhattan—she was famous or fast becoming so. By then, her writing for the New York Post had attracted attention. She had transformed a Post series on the late-night TV host Johnny Carson into a paperback book, and she was writing extensively, and brilliantly, for a gaggle of magazines before she settled down and made Esquire pretty much her home. Early on, she had developed what writers call “a voice”—a characteristic and appealing idiosyncratic style—and while she later wrote about how she had developed it over time, it was in fact discernible in her childhood letters home from Camp Tocaloma in Flagstaff, Arizona. She was a rebuke to writer’s schools everywhere. She had clearly learned to write in the womb. But beyond what was an amazing literary output—she compiled her freelance pieces into a collection titled Wallflower at the Orgy—Nora had become a personage. She was a slight woman—a foodie but a dinnertime nibbler—but she could throw enormous weight. Something about her attracted the more famous, the equally famous, and the about-to-be famous. She was endowed with heroic chutzpah, a voice that somehow cut through cocktail party clutter, although there was nothing brassy about it.
Nora had what the army calls a command presence. It was somehow picked up by, among others, passing waiters or, it seemed, even cabdrivers who were blocks away. She had immense self-confidence, a ready wit, a capacious hard drive of a mind, and absolute certainty. Some people feared her, a few people hated her, but nobody ignored her. At home, she was setting a table that had not been equaled since the fabled one at the Algonquin Hotel. Hers, too, was round.
Clay and Aaron had wanted Nora, not necessarily Dan, to write a piece for New York magazine, but they offered the assignment to them both. Dan accepted. Nora did not. Felker demurred. New York magazine was no longer interested, but Felker and Latham were interested in what effect their rejection had on the couple. What did it mean that Nora had titled her 1970 collection Wallflower at the Orgy and that Dan had followed two years later with a Playboy article “My First Orgy”? “I was playing with the idea of the piece,” Latham said later.
Whatever the idea of the piece was, it didn’t quite work out. Clay and Aaron gave me a list of couples where the woman not only competed with the man but in some cases eclipsed him. I was to interview the increasingly famous Barbara Walters, whose husband at the time was Lee Guber, a prominent but hardly famous theatrical producer. Also on my list were Barbara Howar, a Southern writer and Washington celebrity, and her lover, Willie Morris, the immensely respected former editor of Harper’s magazine. I think I had Helen and David Brown. He was both a theatrical and film producer, but she had become the editor of Cosmopolitan and had filled its pages with sex and sex and then, just to make sure, more sex.
I was to do other couples as well. One was the combo of Sally Quinn, who had zoomed to spectacular prominence as a writer for the Washington Post’s new Style section, and her boyfriend, Warren Hoge, then the city editor of the New York Post and on his way to a distinguished career at the New York Times. But most of all there were the Greenburgs, Nora and Dan. Their marriage was supposedly in trouble.
I called Nora.
“Oh, Richard, we all wondered who Clay was going to get to do this piece,” she said.
“Well . . .”
“You’re too good for this.”
“Really? You don’t even know who I am.”
“Yes, I do. And you are too good for this. I mean, I could see cooperating if I was promoting a book, but I’m not. So, why would I do this? Why would I talk about my private life if I’m not getting anything out of it?”
These all seemed like good questions to me. I have put them down as I remember them, but what I clearly remember—no memory fog here—is how precise she seemed, how strong and just so logical. There was nothing evasive about her, nothing about being pressed for time or some other lame excuse. She just didn’t want to do it. It made no sense to her. That made plenty of sense to me. I told her so, and we planned to meet about a month later in Washington, when the new journalism magazine More was holding a convention and where Rolling Stone magazine, even hotter than More, was giving a party. We would meet at the party.
The Rolling Stone event was held on the mezzanine level of the Mayflower Hotel. It was a boisterous and packed gathering of heroes. Journalism—particularly print journalism—was suddenly triumphant. It was not all that long before that Spiro Agnew, the former Maryland governor and about to be former vice president of the United States (he would plead “no contest” to corruption charges on October 10, 1973), was inveighing against what would later be called the establishment press. He called the members of that press “nattering nabobs of negatism”—a phrase concocted by the White House speech writer William Safire, destined before long to become a nabob himself as an op-ed columnist for the vigorously negative New York Times.
Agnew was the point man for an administration that made the press into an enemy. The Nixon people characterized it as elitist and liberal, not sharing the values of ordinary and altogether admirable Americans. Indeed, the Nixon White House was onto something. The press had grown in wealth and importance. The Washington Post, not even the most important newspaper in Washington a mere decade earlier, was now vying with the New York Times in setting the national news agenda. The television networks were of supreme importance, and what were once regional newspapers—the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, and others—were now circulating in Washington and being read carefully. They all tilted left—antiwar and anti-Nixon.
Reporters were becoming famous. They were becoming nationally known, not merely influential in Washington or some state capital, but cheered as tribunes of the people. None were more famous than Woodward and Bernstein, and no newspaper was more acclaimed than the Washington Post. It was ousting a president. It had pried a manhole cover off a sewer of presidential abuse—burglaries, wiretaps, the pilfering of personal records, the use of the Internal Revenue Service to punish or harass political enemies—and then a cover-up of all these crimes through the use of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Here, at last, was a story to stop the presses. Here, finally, was the hoary cliché realized—the story to blow the roof off city hall, or the Capitol in this case. In due course (1976), the movie All the President’s Men was made about Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, but as good as it was—and it was very good, indeed—it seemed oddly redundant. The whole thing had seemed like a movie all along.
In a New York magazine piece, Nora honored the great story. “I have been in Washington, off and on, for only the last eight months, but there was no way to be there, in whatever journalistic capacity, and not know it was the best story one had ever covered.”
Richard Nixon had just resigned. August 9, 1974 was an emotionally stormy night—rainy and warm, as well—and Carl and I drove around for a while and finally settled on a small party somewhere in the safely liberal Adams Morgan section of Washington. I remember little about it, except that it was dull and non-jubilant, precisely what Carl was seeking. It was important for him not to be seen gloating. He did not gloat.
In her piece, Nora did not gloat either. But she was covering the press, and she knew that for the press there could never be better days. She rued the end of the story, the loss of the Dostoevskyian Nixon as well as his astonishing collection of henchmen, and the plunge into the tepid constancy of the genially conservative Gerald Ford.
The Watergate scandal had seemed a conspiracy buff’s concoction, a tale for naïfs. Experienced Washington hands were certain they knew better. Richard Nixon had been on his way to a landslide victory over Senator George McGovern. (Nixon won an astounding forty-nine states.) Why risk it all on what his own press secretary had called a “third-rate burglary”? And why burglarize the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and not, more logically, McGovern’s campaign headquarters, which was much more likely to house secret plans, incriminating or embarrassing memos . . . something!
Nixon had been around forever, entering Congress in 1946, winning a Senate seat in 1950, and becoming Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president in 1953. He had run for president himself in 1960, losing by a hair’s breadth to John F. Kennedy and then losing a California gubernatorial race two years later. He had been a congressman, senator, vice president, and high-powered New York lawyer. He was the most experienced of experienced politicians, and Watergate was dumb—and therefore unlikely.
The naïveté of Nixon’s goons was fortunately matched by the naïveté of the Post’s Watergate duo. They didn’t know enough to know better—or so it seemed. The more experienced reporters at the Washington Post tried to get Woodward and Bernstein taken off the story. They were called “the kids.” They were inexperienced. They believed what their sources—What sources, anyway?—were telling them. They would embarrass the newspaper.
But Carl came to see the story. He saw it in the same way an artist sees beauty in the prosaic. He had come from a left-wing family that knew Nixon in an almost tactile way. Nixon had been on the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee. He had waged one of the dirtiest campaigns in American political history, the California Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he had smeared as a “pinko,” a fellow traveler, a naïve lefty in the thrall of the Soviet Union. He had called her “the Pink Lady,” pink “right down to her underwear,” he added in a smutty aside.
Carl sensed Nixon looming over Watergate. This ability to see over the horizon—which for newspapers is just the next day—was itself seen by Alan Pakula, the director of All the President’s Men. He was shooting in Washington, and he and I were walking to lunch when he said, “Carl always knew Nixon was behind Watergate.” It was a moment of clarity, the sort of thing a film director, like a diamond cutter, extracts from his material. Who is this character? Who is this complex person who has to be explicated in less than a hundred minutes? Pakula had nailed Carl—and Carl had nailed Nixon.
I could not get into the Rolling Stone party where I was to meet Nora. It was a boisterous, stuffed affair that spilled out of the hotel meeting room. There was a guest list and I was not important enough to be on it. Woodward was, and he insisted that I be admitted. I entered and I heard someone say something about Nora Ephron. She was pointed out to me, talking to a celebrated investigative journalist. (I think it was James Ridgeway of the Village Voice, but he has no memory of this incident.) Her back was toward me. I saw a slight woman; dark hair. I approached and possibly interrupted. I offered my name. The guy from the phone call. I extended my hand.
Nora whirled on me. How dare I write what I had written? I was staggered. My piece had been rewritten by Latham. He had added stuff about Nora and Dan. Nora came out with a book called Wallflower at the Orgy and then Dan went to one. “Nora wrote a piece for Esquire in which she lamented a life without discernible breasts,” I supposedly wrote, and Dan “mentioned with approval that some of his orgy mates were well stacked.”
Trouble was, I had written none of that. Aaron had. He had shown me a page proof of my article, but what did I know? I was covering the Washington suburbs. He was in the midst of literary New York. He had the authority that comes from getting a table at Elaine’s, the celebrity hangout. I had not protested.
I tried to defend myself, but Nora started quoting from my piece, word for word. Every word. I was under attack, and it was as if she were landing blow after blow. What impressed me most was the recitation of my putative words seemingly flying out of a typewriter and glancing off my forehead. Ping. Ping. This was one smart lady. She characterized my piece as slime and turned to the immensely important journalist who may or may not have been Jim Ridgeway for agreement. I hoped he would disagree, but I was new to Nora and did not yet know that nobody did that. “Right?” she asked.
“Right,” he said.
I walked away.
At Christmastime, Carl called from New York. My wife Barbara had gone to see her parents in Ohio. I was working on a book about Spiro T. Agnew and had stayed behind in Washington. Carl had something to tell me. He was in love. He sounded giddy.
And who is this wonderful woman?
Nora Ephron, he said.
“Good-bye, old buddy,” I said. “This is the end of our friendship.”
Nonsense, he said. They were coming to Washington.
The next day, there was a knock on my door. I opened it. It was Carl, and around him, from the back, came Nora.
“Richard, this will be just like the movies,” she said. “We started off hating each other and we’ll wind up loving each other.”
And we did.