Bob Woodward had hired a limo. For some reason, he sat in the front and the rest of us piled into the back—my wife Barbara and I; Bob’s wife, Francie Bernard; and Carl. It was April 15, 1976, and we were on our way down to the West Village, to Mildred Newman’s place to pick up Nora at group therapy. In an hour or so, she would be married to Carl.
Mildred Newman and her husband, Bernard Berkowitz, were famous A-list shrinks. Both Mildred and Bernie were psychologists. Together they had written the best seller How to Be Your Own Best Friend, blurbed not only by Nora but also by Tony Perkins the actor, Rex Reed the critic, and Neil Simon the playwright. The two shrinks were as celebrated as their celebrity patients.
If you knew them—better yet, if they knew you—you either had it made or were on the way. Nora often dropped their names but rarely attributed to them any particular piece of wisdom. Still, I could tell. For instance, if I said I would try to do something, Nora would seize a nearby ashtray and say, “Try to pick that up.” See, you either do it or you don’t.
Thereafter, I avoided the word “try” as the weasel word it was asserted to be. I found it a useful insight, if not a life-changing wisdom, and it did not take me long to realize that the whole try-to-lift-that-ashtray bit had come from Mildred and Bernie. That was all right with me, although I distrusted celebrity shrinks, and in Mildred and Bernie’s case my cynicism was deepened by the conspiratorial mist that seemed to envelop them—members of the group were forbidden to identify other members of the group or even talk to them about the group when they were outside the group. It reminded me of the Communist Party with its secrecy and smug incestuousness (as if being in need of a shrink was not enough for admission—you had to be famous, too).
Indeed, some pretty famous people belonged to the group, including, of course, Dan Greenburg and Mike Nichols. In fact, when Nora went down to Mexico to report on the filming of Nichols’s Catch-22 for the New York Times Magazine, she had effectively joined a Mildred and Bernie group on location. Many of the actors were the couple’s patients, including Tony Perkins and Richard Benjamin and his wife, Paula Prentiss. Perkins brought in Joel Schumacher, later to become a director, and still later Bob Balaban and his wife, Lynn Grossman, enlisted. Schumacher was so broke he told Mildred he could not pay. Don’t worry, she told him. Someday you will. Little wonder her patients were so loyal.
Mildred and Bernie, so easy to mock, who created something so much like a social clique, were nevertheless revered by their patients. Their methods were unorthodox; they insinuated themselves into the lives of the group’s members. They would, for instance, come backstage to comfort Paula Prentiss before a performance. She could freeze with stage fright, and Mildred would get her to the point where she could perform. Witnessing that was what impressed the actor-director Balaban enough to join the group. Some former members laugh about Bernie and Mildred, but no one disparages them. They were extremely effective.
On this day in April 1976 Nora bounded out of the West Village building. I can’t recall what she was wearing, but I do know she was ebullient, having just told the group that she was getting married. In her autobiographical novel, Heartburn, if not in real life, there was applause and there were many congratulations, and then we were off to the courts in Lower Manhattan, where Surrogate Millard L. Midonick was going to officiate. Suddenly, Nora turned anxious. Maybe it was when Carl mentioned that, after talking to his mother, he suspected that Midonick and his mother, Sylvia Bernstein, had long ago had an affair. “He’s going to want to perform some Indian ceremony,” Nora said out of nowhere.
I was mystified. New York’s surrogates were powerful judicial officials and occasionally the subject of vicious patronage battles. This was the era of weird weddings with exotic religious ceremonies, but the surrogates were usually Democratic Party stalwarts, chosen for fidelity to the organization and not for their anthropological creativity. As if to drive the point home, the surrogate’s chambers were a baronial, high-domed affair with massive pieces of furniture, including a long, heavy table suitable for a medieval feast. It was covered by a suitably heavy tapestry.
Midonick himself, however, was a reformer. He greeted us warmly and said to Carl, “I knew your mother.” Carl shot me a wink.
Midonick stood at one end of the room and readied himself for the ceremony. Normally, he said, he did the standard marriage ceremony, but this day—this very special day—he would like to try something different. Something from an Indian tribe. I think he mentioned the Navahos.
Oh my God, Nora’s right, I thought. I was stunned. How did she know? How could she have known? Were we now going to be asked to do a rain dance?
Instantly, Nora objected. The conventional ceremony would be fine with her, she said sternly. Midonick hesitated and then acquiesced. He reluctantly handed his clerk the printed material he had been holding and, after a moment, began the familiar marriage vows. When he had finished, he nodded to the clerk, and the young man moved to the heavy table and threw back the tapestry. Underneath were about a dozen copies of All the President’s Men, Carl and Bob’s book about their Watergate reporting. Midonick wanted them autographed. The new bride cooled her heels as Carl and Bob dutifully did what was asked of them. We soon piled back into the limo and headed to a small reception in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel.
It was a Nora day from beginning to end—from the pickup at Group to the kibosh on the nontraditional Navaho ceremony and then, in the limo heading uptown, a display of her need to control . . . or panic. The limo driver had headed uptown on Third Avenue. Nora thought he should have chosen the FDR Drive. Third Avenue had lights. The FDR did not. Third Avenue had a twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. The FDR’s forty or maybe fifty.
She erupted. She berated the driver for choosing the wrong route. He mumbled some sort of explanation, maybe something about traffic on the FDR—I don’t know. Whatever it was, Nora was not placated. She homed in on the driver, reprimanding him almost all the way up Third. (See, the FDR would have been quicker.) Woodward, who had served in the navy and just helped bring down the government, was awed.
Nora and Carl, Carl and Nora. They had gotten married in the face of second thoughts. Nora had been warned about Carl. He was a prowler, and Nora, who had already been betrayed by men (and with women she considered friends), was in over her head. They had broken up once, reconciled at Carl’s pleading, and now—her cynicism be damned—she was going where her friends had told her she should not. Like the limo driver, she was taking the wrong route.
In the New York Times account of the wedding, Carl was the headline: BERNSTEIN, CO-AUTHOR OF NIXON BOOKS, WEDS. The item mentioned that the couple had met in December 1973 and that “Mr. Bernstein would resume his book promotion tour with Mr. Woodward.” It ended ominously with a quote from Nora: “Nobody’s moving to the other person’s town.”