Life is about seat assignments.
You’re born in a certain place to certain parents in a certain family, sent to a certain school where you’re assigned a certain seat. It was no different on June 17, 1968 when at the age of twenty-seven and with the studied pose of a newspaperman, I was assigned a certain desk in the newsroom of the Washington Post. On either side of me were people who I have since forgotten, but directly behind me was the man who was going to get everything rolling. He was Carl Bernstein, who would introduce me to Nora Ephron, who would introduce me to the world that I would inhabit for the next forty years or so. She would become my friend, ultimately my best friend, my mentor as a writer, my counselor when I was troubled, my role model in showing what was possible and the doorman to the rest of the world. With the sweetest of smiles, she would set my table and serve my food and bring me to the theater and to the movies over and over again. She would introduce me to her friends, who were sometimes famous, sometimes not, who were always talented and always smart, who had great humor and who lived immense lives, sometimes with blockbuster movies and sometimes with worthy but obscure novels, finally, to her final and lasting husband, Nick, a writer of classic film-noirish screenplays, a successful author, a former police reporter, a man of the film-noirish street and the literary salon whose great strength was his reserve and whose mission was to make Nora Ephron happy. He succeeded.
She had come at me like a gale. She had come down to Washington, dropping the names of the famous, making exotic references, wearing the clothes of the 1970s but the aura of the 1950s and 1960s—Broadway and Hollywood and, of course, tabloid Manhattan where she had worked. She was a lot of talk, so it took a while to discern that she was all-purpose, straight on, like some sort of sleek torpedo, steaming to a career that had been mapped for her by her parents, particularly her mother. Phoebe Ephron would die before she should have, of drink and dashed hopes, but her life had really been a triumph. She was a woman in an age of girls, a writer for the Broadway stage and the Hollywood film, who had abandoned the steno pad for the writer’s tablet and the typewriter—who was doing what few women of the time did, and all the while raising four girls.
She died before I could know her, but nevertheless I know her. She is smart and she is tart and she is warm and she is cold. She writes fast and well and sets a swell table and she will not be confined by any supposed roles for women. She is a writer and she will write until she can write no more. I know her from her daughters, especially Nora, and I respect her for what she did and I am in awe of her for what she was. Nora modeled herself on Dorothy Parker, the writer and wit from the middle of the twentieth century, but Nora did better than that, and the reason she did was because her mother showed her how.
Nora Ephron was not an orthodox feminist. She quibbled and sometimes quarreled with the movement, but she supported it totally and her life was one of full-throated feminism. She loved being a woman—loved it for all its feminine virtues—and loved being one of the girls. She surrounded herself with women, sought out the talented ones, gave them lunch, encouraged their careers, understood their problems as a man could not—and, if she could, made cookies for their children.
Nora wrote about her parents, but not about her own family. There are no cute essays about what her boys did growing up—the usual sitcom calamities of childhood—but her motherhood was fully engaged and enveloping. She was proud of her boys, Jacob and Max—proud of their talents (writing, music), proud of their independence, and proud of their courage. She was never a typical woman, but in many respects she was a typical mother.
For almost forty years, Nora Ephron was a very close friend. But I worked on only one project with her, a script that went nowhere. Aside from her husband, she was probably closest to her sister, Delia. The two collaborated on many projects, movies and plays, while at the same time pursuing independent careers. As sisters and writing partners they had their ups and downs, but never an irrevocable breach. As Nora was dying, Delia sat at her bedside while the two of them worked on a pilot for a television series.
Nick, too, was an occasional writing partner. They worked on a remake of Love Me or Leave Me, a Doris Day–James Cagney vehicle about the torch singer Ruth Etting, but as is frequently the case in Hollywood, it never got made. (Movies that don’t get made can’t bomb.) Informally, however, they collaborated on everything they did. They were both writers, just like Nora’s mother and father. Nick was the husband Phoebe never had. Nora was the Phoebe that Phoebe could never quite be.
I found Nora’s life to be bigger than I had ever imagined—deeper and even more heroic, too. She was central to the lives of so many people. She gave money to causes she favored—the Public Theater, for one—and time to people who simply asked. She was my peerless tugboat, nudging me this way and that. We went through a lot, often together—usually laughing, sometimes crying, always relishing our dumb luck. I am not sure which is better—to have loved her or to be loved by her. Either way was a blessing. Either way, it began with a seat assignment.