Mahatma Gandhi, the revered founder of the Indian state, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, were lovers. This stunning, unsupported, and hugely ridiculous item of gossip was imparted to the touchingly innocent women of the Wellesley entering class of 1958 by the incoming freshman from California, Nora Ephron. She had come from Hollywood, and she knew things that no one else did; and when she conveyed them they were not couched as rumor or speculation—never preceded by the modifier “I have heard”—but imparted as truisms. Not to believe them was a sure sign of denseness, of naïveté, of not knowing how the world, the real world, worked. Nora Ephron, recently from Beverly Hills, knew how the world worked.
Nora was not the only person from Beverly Hills in that class. There was at least one other, and her name—at least the name Nora gave her in an essay for McCall’s magazine—was Bonnie. Bonnie Sloan, as it turned out, although “Sloan” was some Anglicized version of an Eastern European name. Bonnie’s father was not in the movie business but in the paper cup business, and her mother did not write or, for that matter, do anything much at all. Nora reported that her mom’s days were devoted to playing canasta or gin rummy.
Nora and Bonnie were best friends, and at the age of thirteen they decided they would both go to Wellesley. But by the time she arrived on campus, Bonnie had had a nose job, which she had attributed to an auto accident, had collected a huge amount of “Chanel suits and Dior dresses,” some twenty jars of face creams, a copy of the New York Social Register, and a smattering of an English accent which she had acquired the previous summer on a trip to Europe. By then, Bonnie was in the process of becoming a gentile, which for her was a matter of wardrobe and speech inflection and possibly an indifference to food, and so she arrived at Wellesley that late summer of 1958 in a Chanel, while Nora, by her own description, wore “a plain little red plaid dress and red hat.” It is not however how she is remembered.
She is instead recalled as breezing in as a bold Californian—no pleated skirts for her. She wore Capri slacks and a Hawaiian shirt and she soon planted her flag: an eleven-by-fourteen framed black-and-white photo of her mother “draped in furs and getting out of her car going to a premiere in Hollywood,” recalled her close college friend, Jennifer Carden. “It was just so exotic.”
The fur, as it happened, was symbolically important. It was a mink that Phoebe had bought around 1954 from a Beverly Hills furrier who had run into a spot of trouble with the IRS. “It was an enormous mink,” Nora wrote in a 1975 essay called “The Mink Coat,” but what set it off was not its size or its color but its astounding provenance: It was not a gift.
Minks flowed by the acre off the women of Beverly Hills. But they were gifts from their husbands. Phoebe’s mink was nothing of the kind. It came not from Henry but from the partnership of Phoebe and Henry. Phoebe was “defiant” about that—about not being like other mothers, “the other mothers who played canasta all day and went to P.T.A. meetings and wore perfume and talked of hemlines . . .” Phoebe was different.
For that era, Phoebe Ephron was exotic. She did not merely work—odd enough for the time—but she had a genuine career. Her letters to Nora at Wellesley were not handwritten on some sort of girlie stationery, fibrous and parchment-like to the touch, but were typed. This announced a backstory, possibly a job—and not the usual Wellesley route of school, pinned, engaged, married, and then life as a homemaker Junior Leaguer. Phoebe’s letters were businesslike, briskly written, and tart. To at least some of the Wellesley girls, her letters came not just from Hollywood but from the future—from a place women would someday go.
Nora would read the letters out loud to her college friends. Who had a mother like this? Whose mother could write like that? In fact, who had a mother who worked, who earned money, who eschewed housework and domesticity, the way Phoebe Ephron did? When Phoebe was asked what a particular woman did, she would dismissively say, “her nails.”
Henry Ephron used the phone. He would call Nora at Wellesley, frequent and lengthy phone calls in an era when a long distance call was a great luxury, reserved for whispered family tragedies. He would pour out his heart to her. As far as her parents were concerned, Nora had gone straight from high school to adulthood. In a family of careening emotions, the eldest daughter became wife and mother.
The troubles of the Ephron family were not evident to the women of Wellesley. Instead, they saw in Phoebe nothing but glamor. One recalled spotting her at the intermission of a play she and Henry had written. It was called Take Her, She’s Mine, and it was based on the lives of two teenage girls, a lightly disguised Nora and Delia. It opened on Broadway at the end of 1961 and had previewed in New Haven earlier that year. Nora and some friends came down to Connecticut from Wellesley for the show. Not only was it a signal event for the young women—how many of them had seen a Broadway-bound production?—but there, in an alley at intermission, was Phoebe, catching a moment alone. She was smoking a cigarette and wearing that voluminous mink coat—confirmation of all that her letters had intimated.
Predictably, Nora became a college journalist. She had been on her high school newspaper, and so it was just a matter of time until her name would appear on the masthead of the Wellesley College News. It was, however, a snoozy time on America’s college campuses. The storm of student disruptions was not even on the horizon.
Still, being on the newspaper was both fun and exhilarating. Lynn Sherr, also at Wellesley and bound for a great career as a print and television journalist and the author of several books, recalled the sense of excitement and importance that every journalist experiences—at least at first—but hardly ever acknowledges. That feeling of being special that comes with review tickets to local plays, with review copies of books from publishers, with being the first in so many ways—but mostly from writing something that everybody reads. The paper sets an agenda that is widely discussed, debated, or merely noted. For the journalist, this is thrilling—or, sometimes, frightening—but the feel of it is mighty like the one described by entertainers when they first hear the narcotic of applause: Me? Yes, you.
But with the thrill comes accountability. This Nora faced head-on when, in her junior year, she and Jennifer Carden reviewed a novel by May Sarton, a Wellesley faculty member. Sarton was not one of those college teachers who tosses off the occasional book infected with footnotes. She was an important novelist who would later, daringly, reveal herself as a lesbian and become a feminist icon.
Sarton was not yet out of the closet when she published The Small Room, but it contained hints aplenty—same-sex relationships between college teacher and student, teacher and teacher, and so on. (It is set at a school much like Wellesley.) One of these relationships the Wellesley reviewers—Nora and Jennifer—called “abnormal.” Maybe that’s what set Sarton off.
For both reviewers Sarton’s sexuality was not the issue at all. Their gripe was with her condescending treatment of both students and student government. This was too much for both Nora and Jennifer, who concluded that The Small Room was too small in its outlook. They panned it. Sarton, furious, ordered them to appear in her office.
As it happened, Nora at the time was in Massachusetts General Hospital, in nearby Boston, having a pilonidal cyst removed. The cyst is located at the base of the spinal column, making sitting painful. So for the showdown with the imperious, intimidating, and indignant Sarton, Carden went alone.
The prospect of facing Sarton without Nora at her side terrified Carden. But as she was approaching Sarton’s campus office, a taxi pulled up and Nora popped out. She was holding a rubber ring that served as a cushion. They went to face the formidable Sarton together.
For the next thirty minutes, Sarton upbraided them as nonentities who wrote for a student newspaper that no one read anyway. A terrified Carden said little. But a resolute Nora, gripping her rubber cushion, stood her ground. They were journalists, she said. They had offered an opinion—and that was what they were supposed to do. Nora offered no apologies. She was right and that’s was all there was to it. Nora was Nora even before she became Nora.
When the writer L. P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” he might have had in mind college life in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was not a place where young people merely dressed somewhat differently or listened to a different kind of music. It was a place of stifling convention and conformity. The rules were rigid, in loco parentis regulations of all sorts, so bizarre in our rearview mirror they seem not just quaint but insane. College was in some senses merely kindergarten for big kids.
As if to show just how conformist college life of the early 1960s could be, the young women of Wellesley were asked to join students across the county to be photographed in the nude. This shockingly dopey program lasted from the late 1940s through the 1970s. It was developed to examine the rate and severity of several diseases. One of the diseases was rickets, usually caused by malnutrition and not likely to be found in Wellesley students or the students of other elite institutions. Nevertheless, without a murmur of protest, thousands of students over the years lined up naked to have their pictures taken. Such was the docility of the times. Such, in a snapshot, or many, was the 1950s and early 1960s. In those days, students did what they were told.
That culture—compliant and conformist—would crash in a frenzy of demonstrations and protests in the later 1960s. But at the moment, all was quiet. Vietnam was still called Indochina, and France was fighting to retain it as a colony. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was at Boston University earning his doctorate in theology; Jews were still being excluded from prestigious law firms; and women were expected to marry, have a brief career, and then stay home with their two or more children, one boy and one girl if at all possible.
It is tempting to see the Nora of Wellesley as always ahead of her time, which in a sense she was. She was aiming for a career. She also had her eye on a marriage and a family, but like her mother before her she saw no reason why she could not have it all—after all, men did. She wanted a career, but she also wanted to get married—and at the time she almost did. She described her intended as “a humorless young man,” who doubtless saw no humor in that description. He was finishing up at Harvard Law School and moving to New York, and she was going to transfer to Barnard College in New York to be with him.
Nora went to see the class dean about arranging the transfer and was given a bit of advice that she wrote about later: “You have worked hard at Wellesley. When you marry, take a year off. Devote yourself to your husband and your marriage.”
Roy Furman was at the Shubert Theater in New Haven the night of the mink. He was Nora’s boyfriend at the time, a Harvard Law School student who went on to establish a hugely successful investment firm, become an important New York–based philanthropist, vice chairman of Lincoln Center, and—most pertinently—a Broadway producer. In fact, he became a lead producer of Nora’s final work, the play Lucky Guy, but never conferred with her about it—maybe because he wondered if Nora would object to his participation. Their college romance had not ended well.
Furman was a typical Nora boyfriend. As a Wellesley student, her social life revolved around the elite New England schools. From Harvard Law School alone, she dated Mortimer Zuckerman, the real estate magnate who at one time or another owned the Atlantic magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the New York Daily News, and Stephen G. Breyer, an eventual Supreme Court justice. Years later, Nora and Zuckerman resumed a relationship. It was brief and deteriorated into a lasting friendship.
Furman’s recollection of that night at the Shubert varies from those of others who were there. He remembers a glamorous Phoebe Ephron all right, but he also remembers her as being drunk. He recalls both Henry and Phoebe as being witty and garrulous company, but he was more than awed by them. He was intimidated. He found them loud and overbearing, throwing off cultural references the way a wet dog shakes off water. He was a kid from Brooklyn, a graduate of the proletariat Brooklyn College, a self-described provincial, and here were these people, the slightly tipsy Ephrons, Outer Borough Jews once themselves, who had somehow managed to vault the rivers (East, Hudson) to command Beverly Hills and Manhattan. They were not New York Jews at all. They were not wedded to a neighborhood or tribe but to wit, repartee. They were always sitting down to dinner.
As for their oldest daughter, Nora was already what she would become. She was as voluble as them, as witty, as well-read, as exuberant. Furman’s friends were charmed by her and sought her company. Furman, while dazzled and in awe, was not in love. Nora was extraordinary, and Furman knew he was not likely to meet someone like her again. She was rare—a star shooting by. Should he catch her?
His answer was no. If he wanted a wife—and that prospect hung over their yearlong relationship—then it would have to be a woman who cooked, who made his breakfast, raised his children, and did little else. Nora could cook and raise children, but she wanted to do more—plenty more. Her prefix of choice for wife was working, not house. That much was clear and all Wellesley knew it. Nora was going to New York. Nora was going to write.
Furman backed out of the relationship. Later, when he became a financier, they sometimes met—at this or that cocktail party, at this or that event, in Manhattan, in the Hamptons. The encounters were cordial, not warm. At home, discussion of Nora’s latest book or essay or pronouncement was not tolerated by Furman’s then wife. The past lingered. It threatened.
Roy Furman runs a billion-dollar investment fund. He has been a passive or active producer of more than fifty Broadway plays. He’s been vice chairman of Lincoln Center and a past chairman of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He is an active alumnus of both Brooklyn College and Harvard Law School and was finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Roy Furman is a man of immense accomplishment, power, and prestige. Yet one reason—an important reason—he ended his relationship with Nora Ephron is that when she was twenty-one and he twenty-two, she overwhelmed him with her Hollywood background as well as her personality, brains, and ambition. He felt mismatched.
“I was scared,” he said.
Furman was hardly alone. The word “scared” or “scary” is a leitmotif when classmates of Nora’s are asked to recall their time with Nora back in her Wellesley days. Sometimes the word is offered as a synonym for awe or respect—as in she always seemed to know more than anyone else and was always absolutely certain about what she knew.
“She was scary in that she always knew she was right. You didn’t want to cross her,” said Lynn Sherr.
All Wellesley knew Nora would have a career and a marriage—but simultaneously or, if not, in what order probably even she did not know. She not only told everyone she would be a writer, she was quite specific about where she would write. It would be for the New Yorker. (She and Jennifer even papered their dorm room with New Yorker covers.) For once, Nora was wrong—or premature. Eventually, she would write for the New Yorker. First, though, she’d clip newspapers for Newsweek.