As far as I was concerned, that “Holy shit!” was way overdue. I knew of Nora’s penchant for overreacting to some perceived slight—something she would take very personally but that was meant innocently. Years before, she had come to my house in Washington for dinner and another of the guests was Patrick Caddell, then a very big deal as President Jimmy Carter’s in-house pollster and political adviser. Caddell brought a date, a young woman—a very young woman—whose contribution to the conversation—was it about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?—was to refer to Communists as “reds.” I flinched. Such a retrograde word! So 1950s. So . . .
Nora hit the roof.
“Reds? she demanded. “Reds!” she repeated. Her voice was loud. She was indignant. “Who says reds anymore?”
The young woman instantly recoiled. She clearly meant nothing by the word. She clearly was unaware of its McCarthyite provenance or that Nora’s parents had lived through the Hollywood blacklist, the Red Scare, and were themselves liberals, as, for that matter, was their daughter. She knew none of that. “Reds!” The word had somehow come tripping lightly off her tongue. It had hit the floor like a sack of rocks.
The very young woman instantly deflated. Explanations aborted in her throat. She gagged on second thoughts. She could say nothing. The verbal blows rained down on her. “Reds!” My God, she had said “Reds.”
She was just a kid. It didn’t matter what she’d said. This was child abuse. I was appalled.
Holy shit! I thought.
Nora was tough. She was tough in her writing, sending laser-like sentences from her keyboard to the printed page or the Internet, and she was tough in her personal life. Everyone who knew her—everyone who loved her—knew that, recognized that, and either felt her wrath or feared her wrath. She could turn suddenly dismissive, not in so many words—although the words would be there—but in body language, in a look, and then she would somehow inhale room temperature air and exhale frost. Almost anything could trigger such a reaction—a business dispute, an act of disloyalty, mistreatment of a friend, lack of respect, or something else entirely. It was the last category that was the most frightening because it was so ill defined, so impossible to anticipate. All the victim knew was that one day his or her relationship with Nora went from animated to inert. The loss—the loss of such a cherished friend—was incalculable, but what made it worse was the realization that she was not just a pal but the nexus of your social life. You had not merely lost a friend. You had lost a social set.
“She sort of ran the city,” Scott Rudin, the theatrical and film producer, said.
“You didn’t want to be on the wrong side of her. You know what I mean. She could be cutting, as you know, tough. You cross her selectively.”
And yet the same people who feared Nora loved her. Of course, the people who feared her admired her, but love is an emotional metric beyond that, and love is what they felt. It’s hard to explain how someone could be both feared and loved—maybe parents have that quality, and military leaders and coaches of football and other sports—but in Nora’s case some of the fear had to do with losing her love. She was so charming, so smart, so witty, and so sweet that if she turned cold, it was more than an emotional rebuff, it was a failure: You had flunked Nora.
I luxuriated in Nora. I loved the life she offered me—the food I ate, the plays, the screenings, the people I met, the conversations we had—the fun, the laughs, and after a while, the shared history. We were like an old married couple. No one—with the exception of her sisters, especially Delia—knew her as long as I did, and possibly none knew her as well.
Maybe more important—at least to me—is that no one knew me as well. We had been through so much together—the breakup of her marriage and two of mine, her comically misguided relationship with a guy who took her to shoot birds in Georgia, the affair with Joe Fox and then the lasting one with Nick, the hurt over the Heartburn reviews, the distressing period of movie flops, the challenge of raising two sons in a Manhattan where the subway to anywhere was right downstairs, the upheavals of her father, and the times I came to her with a bruised heart and chaotic plans and she calmly talked me into a soft landing. Once she gave me permission to marry. Once she gave me permission to divorce. Both times it was the same woman.
I felt romantic toward Nora, which means I loved her, which means I loved walking next to her, sitting next to her, watching her cook. I loved shopping with her, which meant I was shopping for a gift and she was helping me. I loved her smile, loved to make her laugh—loved that above all—loved the sense that we shared so much but sometimes not our political views. I supported the war in Iraq, the one that led to the American occupation, and she did not. I assured her it would not lead to an increase in terrorism but might extinguish the threat. I was wrong, of course, and she was right, and only once did she ever acknowledge that. It happened one night at dinner when I confessed that I was wrong and she, nodding, said something like “I’ll say”—and, mercifully, left it at that.
I loved her when she was irrational or emotional or whatever you might call it. I loved her when she told off the Secret Service agents who had the audacity to forbid our cab from pulling over to the curb at some Washington event just because the vice president was about to arrive. I loved her when she flipped off those waiters in Naples and when, right after her wedding with Carl, she told off the limo driver who had taken Third Avenue uptown and not the FDR Drive.
I loved her the many times I stayed with her—the apartment at the Apthorp on Broadway and the houses in the Hamptons. The first was called Trees. It was located in Bridgehampton and was named for the huge elms on the property. The house was an attempt at a Victorian. Nora and Carl spiffed it up and put in a pool with a telephone jack nearby. That enabled Carl to call me in tropical Washington—he on a rubber raft in the pool, I encased in industrial air conditioning. I felt painfully deprived.
Over time, I became the Nora interpreter. I supposedly knew her well enough to explain her, but it took a while. She got less complicated as she got older, warmer and less guarded. After a while, I could see beneath the jokes, and sometimes, as when a person gets hit the wrong way by an unflattering light, I could see the cracks of insecurity and notice when the touch was less than sure. That came with time, an accretion of cuts, the occasional calamity, and then I wanted to engulf her, but I rarely did. We exchanged vows—“I love you,” “I love you”—and left it at that. I sometimes had to recall her words, those words, when she turned distant, and then I had to remember that she was scared of something.
I loved her even when I did not love her. I loved her when the phone went dead or I felt a chill and resigned myself to the fact that our friendship had inexplicably gone cool. I resolved not to care and every day I did. She frightened me, God only knows how she did it, and I would question our relationship and what I was getting out of it. Yes, it was wonderful to be her friend. Yes, it was flattering to be included in her guest list. Yes, I basked a bit in reflected fame and the celebrity swoosh of entering a many-starred restaurant, our table, always the best table, materializing with a proper grovel. But none of that came close to explaining why she meant so much to me. I still don’t know the answer—but, surely, one of the reasons that I loved her is that, just as surely, she did.