Before they moved to Hollywood, Henry and Phoebe Ephron were New York writers, successful playwrights. They went out to the coast for the money and the lifestyle—Nora had home movies of her parents playing tennis in the ridiculous California winter—but not because the conversation was better there or writers more cherished. They arrived credentialed by Broadway. They stayed, temporarily, for twenty-two years, clinging to the lush L.A. life and the studio dole like the houses that threaten to slide off the hills in the rain.
In Hollywood, writers are furniture, rarely cherished, easy to replace, and after a while, sagging. New York writers are a different matter entirely. They matter, or they did. They met at the Algonquin, the Lambs, or the Players. They gathered on the East End of Long Island, the storied and eventually gilded Hamptons, where they drank at Bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton and breakfasted at the Candy Kitchen in the same town. There and in Manhattan, writers were not overshadowed by actors’ fame and wealth. They were central to the town. They could get good tables at celebrated restaurants, and they were cherished by hostesses for their presumed wit, their expected erudition, and, too often, their amusing inebriation.
In New York, writers were not rewritten by hack producers and ordered to cut a chapter or two to entice a vaguely literate audience. Playwrights were sacrosanct, their words untouchable by producer and director and certainly by performer. Time, custom, and—most important—the Guild said so. This was in contrast to the screenwriter. The term “Hollywood writer” carried the freight of compromise, of selling out, of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, of William Faulkner gone to rust and F. Scott Fitzgerald gone to drink.
Henry Ephron was an extroverted guy, personable, smart—and probably, like most screenwriters, terrified of the blank page. Husband and wife worked together, but there is the hint in Henry’s memoir that Phoebe Ephron was “the closer”—the one who knew how to bring the screenplay home, the one who knew how to fix the problem in the second act, who spied the problem that derailed the script. Henry would pace and dictate, with Phoebe lying on the couch, taking it all down. Phoebe would later type up the notes, not in the least a stenographer’s chore. The typist gets the last word.
For a time, Hollywood was good to the Ephrons. They earned $750 a week for starters and $3,000 a week when their contract was renewed. They could afford a maid and a cook. They were writers, making a wonderful living at it, which was not only wonderful but rare. Their friends were mostly New York expats, like themselves.
The dust jacket of Henry Ephron’s memoir, We Thought We Could Do Anything, is a kind of a Walk of Fame on glossy paper. The names of more than sixty movie stars twinkle from the inside back cover—most of them drive-bys who appeared in one of the Ephrons’ pictures. But while the Ephrons were never in the very first rank of Hollywood screenwriters, they did know movie stars and studio heads. They worked at Fox, a major studio with major stars—Cary Grant, for instance, who sat one row ahead of a sixteen-year-old Nora and her mother at a 1957 Fox screening of An Affair to Remember. Years later, Nora would incorporate that movie into her Sleepless in Seattle—an homage from one picture to another but also to her childhood.
Henry Ephron’s book is largely a romp, a version of one of the movies where someone says, “I know, let’s put on a play.” People then go off and write and become successful on the stage. In that sort of movie, these writers know Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld, Jr., and George S. Kaufman and then, on the Super Chief, they go out to Hollywood, bumping into movie stars in the narrow, swaying, corridors of the sleeping car.
It was, in fact, just this way. The Ephrons did know George S. Kaufman, and in 1944 they indeed took the Super Chief to L.A. By then, they had two kids—Nora and Delia—and had discovered that Phoebe was not cut out for the domestic life. After a while, she got that cook, that housekeeper, and a nice Beverly Hills house on Linden Drive, the lesser flats for sure, but Beverly Hills nonetheless. With its Spanish courtyard (later torn down) it was the perfect stage set for a perfect life that eventually turned into a perfect horror. The Ephrons became drinkers, matrimonial brawlers with horrendous fights erupting in the middle of the night, sending the younger kids scurrying downstairs into the arms of Evelyn Hall, the housekeeper. They would get into bed with her.
If this were a movie, some studio exec would point a finger to the end of his nose to indicate a predictable cliché. The life of the Ephrons was indeed that—well-paid screenwriters gone to drink. In real life, though, the kids were scared and always on edge. Phoebe would tank up nightly, a bottle of Dewar’s an evening, and Henry would match her. They once went to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and recognized themselves in the brawling George and Martha. They were shocked and vowed to mend their ways. They soon reverted.
For Nora, this was a painful childhood and adolescence. She recounted it in her writing. “My mother became an alcoholic when I was fifteen,” she wrote in I Remember Nothing. “It was odd. One day she wasn’t an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush.” Equally odd, if you will, is Nora’s flat recitation of what happened. She admits to being terrorized by her mother’s late-night banshee behavior, but the record contains very little else. She simply does not dwell on it. Her parents were alcoholics. It was a fact.
It was a fact, too, that over the years Nora mentioned her disruptive and disturbing childhood but seemed undisturbed and hardly disrupted by it. She wrote about her anxiety when her parents came to visit her at college—would they wake the dorm with their shouting?—but it was all material, a combination of the awkward and the absurd. I never heard a confession of pain. A tear never appeared in her eye. She recounted stories of her father’s wild behavior—how in a single day he had agreed to buy four houses north of New York for a family compound—but this event was described with a combination of reluctant amusement and smoldering anger, not the stuff of tragedy.
She was fifteen when her parents took to the bottle, maybe past the age of childhood trauma, but the confusion of the time, its hurt and raw empathy for her teetering mother and father, are missing. By then, she had put emotional distance between herself and her father, and talked about him in an antiseptically flat way, although sometimes with rising anger: He did this. He did that. It is too easy to repeat the words of her mother when Nora saw her in the hospital, dying: “It’s all copy.” But it seemed that way. She rarely wept. Her friends wondered about that, but then they considered her fearless, too. Not so. Among her fears, I think, was crying. She was afraid to cry.
One story stands out. It is the one she wrote about the famous New Yorker writer Lillian Ross, who came to her parents’ house for a party. Ross was a last-minute addition, brought along by St. Clair McKelway, a former newspaper reporter who had joined the New Yorker staff, where he became a mainstay. Ross was young and already dangerous. She had done the famous takedown of Ernest Hemingway in which he blathered silliness and she recorded it in tight notes. Ross asked to see the house. Phoebe took her around, and they came upon pictures of the Ephron children—Nora and her three sisters.
“Are those your children?” Ross asked.
Yes.
“Do you ever see them?” Ross asked by way of rebuke.
Phoebe responded with the bum’s rush. She asked Ross to leave.
The story became Ephron family legend. It was about their mother, the chic hostess in the Galanos dress, erupting into the indignant momma, furious that she could be asked whether she could be both a writer and a mother. It makes for a good story, but Phoebe’s was an odd reaction. A humorous or self-deprecating rejoinder was in order, or maybe flat-out honesty: Yes, I know what you mean. I have two full-time jobs. Something like that.
Anyway, Nora herself doubted the story. It wasn’t until years later, when she had moved to New York, that she again saw Ross. They met at a party given by Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live. The two women shook hands, meeting like fighters touching gloves before the first bell, asking each other innocuously barbed questions, Nora all the time circling and circling so she could get in the punch about her mother: Had it actually happened?
“I went to your house once,” Ross finally said.
“Really?”
“I didn’t see much of you, though.”
The story is called “The Legend” and it is a very nice piece of work. It ends with Nora now convinced that her mother had indeed given Ross the ol’ heave-ho. Ross’s confirmation redeemed Phoebe in Nora’s eyes. The drunk of her later years reverted to the steely-eyed writer-housewife-mother she had once been, a capacious woman who, much like Nora, could do so much and do it simultaneously,
“I got her back; I got back the mother I’d idolized before it had all gone to hell,” Nora wrote.
But Ross had confirmed nothing, only that she had been to the home. Hers was a one-shoe recitation of the fact. The other never drops—nothing about the getting the boot, no fist-slapping ending, and the story’s emotional content is disproportionate to the facts. Nora wanted so much to redeem her mother, to restore her to the remarkable woman she had once been, that she took this reed and tried to weave a basket from it. In this sense, it fails as a story, but not as an expression of yearning for what was lost. The pain, it seems, endured.
Back in New York, Henry Ephron had worked for George S. Kaufman as his stage manager. Along with his frequent partner Moss Hart, Kaufman was responsible for one hit after another. He was a sought after play doctor as well, but his importance to this tale is that he was a celebrated wit who personified Hollywood’s idea of New York theater. Kaufman was an acerbic man, formidably talented, who had been born in Pittsburgh and had a convert’s zeal for New York. He also had a seat at the Round Table.
The Algonquin Hotel was—and is—located on West 44th Street in the Theater District. The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune were then located nearby, as was the New Yorker magazine and various publishing houses. The place had the three virtues real estate people cherish—location, location, location—and so it was there that in 1919 a Broadway press agent named John Peter Toohey gave a lunch for Alexander Woollcott, the drama critic of the Times. Such a good time was had by all, that the next day they had another lunch—and then another and another. In 1929, it all ended. The famous Round Table was no more.
In the intervening years, the Round Table became celebrated. Two of the attendees were newspaper columnists—Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun—and they were probably neither loath to nor ethically proscribed from mentioning their friends in their columns, almost certainly improving their witticisms. Kaufman was no slouch as a humorist, but the one who is best remembered for both the Round Table and her wit is the lone woman writer among them: Dorothy Parker. She is widely considered Nora’s antecedent. Early on, Nora considered her to be a role model.
The similarities are obvious. They were both women—indeed, Parker was the only female at the Table who was not there as a wife. She was a theater critic, an essayist, an accomplished short story writer, an occasional radio performer, and for a time, a highly successful screenwriter. Her trademark was lacerating, acerbic wit—one-liners that have zinged through the ages.
As Parker got older, she became increasingly involved in left-wing politics. Nora, too, was left of center, and she might have moved even harder left had she lived in Parker’s era—the Depression, the Holocaust, and the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Parker wound up being blacklisted, and for a while she could not work in Hollywood. Nora’s politics were never that intense, and unlike the boozing, disconsolate Parker, she had a sunny personal life. Early on, though, Nora wanted only to be Dorothy Parker. She once wrote that she was raised on Parker’s lines—and, of course, by a mother who more resembled Parker than her daughter did, the drinking above all. That, though, came later.
“All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker,” Nora wrote.
The connection between the table at the Ephrons’ Linden Drive home and the round one at the storied Algonquin were both aspirational and real. New York, the Algonquin, and the Broadway stage were the Jerusalem to which this staunchly secular household would someday return. In the meantime, the Round Table was re-created at dinner. The Ephrons were writers. Moreover, they wrote dialogue. They got paid for wit, for sparkling words, for a way with a story. Their kids not only grew up in a talkie environment, but were expected to do some of the talking. They discussed world affairs and politics. They worshiped FDR and his New Deal, thought Adlai Stevenson should have triumphed over Dwight Eisenhower, and knew the names of obscure nineteenth-century feminists such as Lucy Stone, nowhere near as famous as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Nora’s characteristic way of talking, a manner that swiftly commanded the table, was surely developed at these dinners. Her lingua franca was theatrical, the language and speech patterns of the stage. Sentences were packed with meaning, and when they ended, it was not because she was out of breath, but because a point had been made (a little applause, please). If Henry and Phoebe Ephron hit all the marks in a wonderful career, it nevertheless meant writing not for oneself or for people like oneself, but for studio bosses who wanted to make money—movies, not cinema. The Ephrons were what Jack Warner had in mind when he supposedly exclaimed, “Writers! Schmucks with Underwoods!” Julius Epstein, an Ephron family friend and cowriter of one of Hollywood’s most revered pictures, put it this way: “There wasn’t one moment of reality in Casablanca. We weren’t making art. We were making a living.”
The idea was to take the money and run—to leave Hollywood at the top of your game. But the Ephrons, like many, stayed too long. The jobs were drying up. The absurd salaries were going to others. The half-life of the screenwriter was closing in on them. Henry was philandering, and Phoebe, like her mother before her, was drowning in a maddening deafness. The clever response that meant so much to her was no longer possible if she could not hear the initiating remark. Someone had corked the round table. The sounds were muffled. The quips evaporated in midair.
In 1963, after completing the script of Captain Newman, M.D., the Ephrons sold the Linden Drive house and moved back to New York and the Broadway stage. New York is where Phoebe died in 1971 at an East Side hospital where, to the last, she begged for a drink and Henry, out of mercy, gave her an overdose of Demerol. Phoebe’s last words to Nora have become legendary, if not famous. Nora repeated them all her life, cited them, invoked them in her eulogy, and many years later her son Jacob Bernstein used them as the title of the documentary film he made about his mother. They were, it seems, her mother’s last tutorial to her daughter, showing her once again how things were done—even dying. Phoebe was physically diminished, wracked by her cirrhosis and a terminus for countless life-sustaining tubes. Nora gasped when she entered her mother’s hospital room. “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes,” Phoebe said.
In his memoir, Henry Ephron had it somewhat different. “Take notes, Nora. Take notes. Everything is copy.”
Phoebe Ephron was fifty-seven when she spoke those words. By then, she was a sour alcoholic, her wit curdled into spite and cocooned by an engulfing deafness. She was dying a very early death. She must have been angry and scared, all the usual emotions, but what we get is this sort of George S. Kaufman quip, something from the Marx Brothers, nothing to suggest a career hollowed out, a woman who had thrived in a man’s world and then, what with four children and a husband who had his own troubles with the bottle, could write no more. She lacked the flint to make the spark that would burst into a play or a screenplay.
Phoebe Ephron’s final project was a play called Howie. Significantly, it was a solo effort, Henry apparently relegated to kibitzer. Howie was about a Long Island family and the twenty-one-year-old daughter was played by Patricia Bosworth, who would go one to become a journalist and biographer. One of her books was about her father, the celebrated lawyer Bartley Crum, who, among other things, represented the so-called Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters who went to prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bosworth had much in common with Nora—not just a background in the leftist politics of the Hollywood writing community, but also parents who were alcoholics. In his latter days, Bart Crum was a pathetic drunk.
Howie tried out in Boston. The play was Phoebe’s alone, but Henry attended the rehearsals, offering unsolicited and unwelcome advice as the script went through the usual revisions. The cast was one day told to expect some more revisions, and so they assembled on the stage of the Colonial Theater. Suddenly, Phoebe came running down the aisle with Henry in pursuit until, blocked by the stage she could go no farther. Henry grabbed her from behind, whirled her around, and socked her in the jaw.
Phoebe left. She returned to the theater with her jaw wired.
Howie opened on September 17, 1958, suffered poor reviews, and closed three days later. On opening night, both the Ephrons and Bart Crum were drunk. Nora went backstage. She had a question for Bosworth: Why was she wearing falsies? Bosworth, who like Nora was hardly busty, replied that Phoebe had insisted on it. Nora was flabbergasted. Her mother didn’t even wear a bra until after her fourth child was born, she told Bosworth.
It was many years before Bosworth told Nora the story of her parents’ brawl. Nora’s reaction was nonchalant. Sounds right, she more or less said. In his later years, Henry Ephron was often violent and subject to rages. He became a feared, unpredictable presence, sometimes on the periphery of Nora’s life, sometimes commanding immediate attention. Phoebe died in 1971 and Henry in 1992. In 1978, he married June Gale, the widow of Oscar Levant, famous for his musical genius and his mental instability. Gale is not mentioned in Henry’s New York Times obituary, which, judging by her quotes, was approved by Nora.
In the telling of her daughters, Phoebe Ephron took to drink suddenly—one day not a drinker, the next day a lush. Nora, as the eldest of the four girls, got if not the best of her mother, then the best years. Phoebe was Nora before Nora could become Nora. She was a writer, which is a statement not just of occupation but of lifestyle and fervent commitment and a commensurate determination to rid herself of the ghetto, the shtetl, which was just down the hallway in her own home. Phoebe Ephron spoke Yiddish to her mother.
Kate Lotkin, was born in 1891 in Bobruisk, Belarus (then Russia). The town was a provincial capital with a sizable number of Jews. It had all the trappings of Eastern European Jewish life, a theater and numerous synagogues. In 1904 or thereabouts—the records are sometimes in conflict—Kate joined the mass exodus of Jews from the Russian Empire to America. She apparently traveled by herself, following her brother, Louis, who had emigrated two years earlier. For whatever reason, Kate did not live with him but boarded with a family on Manhattan’s East 103rd Street. The 1910 census had her working at a factory—probably a sweatshop. That same year she married Louis Wolkind, who had arrived from Russia in 1899. Phoebe was born four years later.
There would be three Wolkind children—Harold, the eldest; Phoebe; and then Richard, born when Kate was around thirty-five. Dickie, as he became known, was fourteen years younger than Phoebe and, in effect, became her ward. It was apparently Henry and Phoebe who paid for his college education. He became an artist, and when the entire family followed Henry and Phoebe to California, he went to work for Disney.
For Kate Wolkind, her son’s death was the first of several tragedies in a life that was both fortunate and accursed. She had avoided the Holocaust and the mass murder of the Jews of Bobruisk. She had worked and married her way out of the sweatshops and the tenements of East Harlem. She married a businessman, had three children, and died in sunny California. It was, on the face of it, a good life.
But her husband had cheated on her—maybe frequently. A son had died young and a daughter at fifty-seven. Her husband had repeatedly gone broke, and he wound up living a faux retirement in Los Angles, existing not on his savings, as he pretended, but on the Ephron dole. Kate herself had preceded her daughter into deafness—“Bacon and eggs, as usual,” Nora’s sister Delia wrote her grandmother replied when she asked, “How are you?” To her daughter, she was an object lesson in a housecoat: This is how not to conduct your life.
Phoebe Ephron would never be a housewife. It was not only that domesticity bored her but also that she was a woman who didn’t just want to be a writer, she was a writer. And additionally, she had witnessed her mother’s faithfulness to her unfaithful husband, and if it was not a lesson to her, then it was to her daughter Nora. The imperative to control her environment—to, in effect, direct—had to stem at least in part from the way her father and her grandfather treated their wives. If one was making an old-fashioned movie of Nora’s life, one would isolate the day Henry Ephron insisted on driving Nora to her new elementary school. He got lost.
To see these patterns repeated generation after generation—the strong woman, the wayward husband—suggests the futility of therapy or behavior modification and a surrender to the power of genes. Nora would no doubt argue with that, and I, finding the thought merely interesting, would indifferently move on. But the indomitability of Kate and Phoebe, their resoluteness and concern for others, surely wended their way into Nora’s character.
Nora was, really, the kindest of persons. She could be stern and withering and all of that, but if you needed someone at your side in the hospital, if you needed companionship, if your child needed a surrogate mother or an internship or, really, anything at all, Nora was the one to turn to. She not only was the occasional godmother but she was the patient ear for the children of her friends who had come to a parenting dead end. She remembered birthdays; she celebrated weddings. Talk to my kids, her friends would plead. She was a vast mother to a brood of kids who had their own parents but looked to her as somehow wiser, maybe because their parents did as well.
In 1989, Nora’s college roommate, Marcia Burick, lost her son, Ken. He had been a student at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and in a fit of depression he went to a local gun shop, bought a weapon—and killed himself. Nora, who had been in England at the time, hopped a plane for the funeral, and a few years later was the inaugural speaker at the Ken Goldstein Memorial Lecture. Afterward, Marcia insisted that the two of them drive to the gun shop where Ken had bought his weapon. Marcia wanted to confront the storekeeper. Nora would not permit it.
“She said, ‘You just go across the street and wait for me.’ ” Nora entered the shop and came out some minutes later.
“I said to her, ‘What did you say?’ She said, ‘We’re not to talk about it.’ ”
Years earlier, Nora had shown Burick just how cheeky she could be. Not long after leaving Wellesley, the two women were rooming in New York when Nora took a call for Marcia. The caller was Clayton Fritchey, the press aide for Adlai Stevenson, who was John F. Kennedy’s ambassador at the United Nations. Marcia had applied there for a job and was at that moment wandering the streets of New York, unemployed, broke, and down in the dumps. Fritchey was reporting that Marcia was still under consideration for a spot in the press office.
“I came back at Friday at five o’clock or something, and Nora said, ‘I didn’t know where to find you, you have the job at the U.S. Mission.’
“And I said, ‘How did that happen?’ She said, ‘Mr. Fritchey called and said tell Marcia to come in next week, we want to have another interview with her.’ And Nora said, ‘Well, she can’t possibly come in next week, Mr. Fritchey. She’s been offered a very high-level job at the Ford Foundation and she has to let them know on Monday. So you need to tell me now that she does or doesn’t have the job.’
“And he said, ‘All right, tell her she’s got the job and to be here at eight thirty Monday morning.’ ”
Did Nora confront the storekeeper? Did Nora really bluff out Clayton Fritchey? Hard to say, but my guess is yes. In the first place, she was no liar. And in the second place, both these stories are consonant with everything I ever saw of Nora. She was not physically brave, not some sort of reckless skier or mad spelunker, but she had no trouble confronting people. She once told off the Secret Service when some agents were clearing a space for the vice president’s limousine. Nora and I were in a cab, which was waved away by the Secret Service as we were on our way to some event. Deferring, as usual, to authority, I told the cabdriver to move on, but Nora leaped out to give the Secret Service agents a piece of her mind. Unimpressed, they sternly ordered her back into the cab and on her way.
Far more dangerously, she one night effectively challenged about a dozen Neapolitan waiters to a fight. We had arrived late in Naples and dashed to a famous pizzeria located on the picturesque but ominous waterfront. We got to the place just as it was emptying and, to the fury of the waiters, simply took a table. A reluctant waiter arrived and we ordered a special pizza, a Neapolitan favorite. He returned with the sorriest pizza any of us had ever seen—payback for keeping the place open. Nora took one bite, rose, and faced the waiters who were lined up against the far wall. There were about a dozen of them, a sinister lot, some of them I histrionically recall picking their teeth with stilettos.
“Napoli!” Nora cried out.
The waiters snapped to attention.
Nora inserted her right hand into the crook of her elbow—the universally known gesture for Fuck you!
I gulped. What, was she out of her mind?
The waiters didn’t stir. None of them made a move. We were alone in the restaurant, surely about to die, I thought.
Nora gave the waiters a triumphant look. She sat down, pleased. We dutifully nibbled at our awful pizza and somehow got back to our hotel, a grandiloquent dump with played-out air conditioning. Nora never said a word about it. I never forgot it.