The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  “Omigod,” she said. “And I even edited it.”

  We talked it over and decided that I might as well take the assignment anyway.

  “After all,” said Mrs. LaBarre, “if it doesn’t bother us to run the same article twice, it shouldn’t bother you to write it twice.”

  “I have just one question, though,” I said. “What is this about the great Cleveland Amory and his theory that shyness is just selfishness?”

  “Did she say that?” said Mrs. LaBarre. “She must be kidding—I don’t even think she likes Cleveland Amory.”

  A few weeks later I turned the article in, and Harriet LaBarre called. “We’re going to run it,” she said, “but there are two things we want to change.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “First of all, I was wrong about Cleveland Amory,” she said. “I’m afraid we do have to say that shyness is really selfishness.”

  “But shyness isn’t really selfishness,” I said.

  “Well, I know, but that’s the way we have to put it.”

  “What’s the second thing?” I said.

  “Well, it’s just one little change Helen made, but I wanted to read it to you. You have a sentence that reads, ‘It is absurd to think that any girl who asks a nice-looking man how to get to Rockefeller Center will be bundled up in a burlap bag and sold into a Middle Eastern harem.’ ”

  “Yes,” I said, realizing it wasn’t much of a sentence.

  “Well, Helen changed it to read, ‘The notion that any girl who asks a nice-looking man how to get to Rockefeller Center is immediately bundled up in a burlap bag and sold into a Middle Eastern harem is as antique and outmoded a myth as the notion that you can’t take a bath while you’re menstruating.’ ”

  “What?”

  “Is that all right?” she said.

  “Is that all right? Of course it’s not all right. How did that particular image get into my article?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Harriet LaBarre. “We’re thinking of doing a piece on menstruation and maybe it was on her mind.”

  I hung up, convinced I had seen straight to the soul of Helen Gurley Brown. Straight to the foolishness, the tastelessness her critics so often accused her of. But I was wrong. She really isn’t that way at all. She’s just worried that somewhere out there is a girl who hasn’t taken a bath during her period since puberty. She’s just worried that somewhere out there is a girl whose breasts aren’t being treated properly. She’s just worried that somewhere out there is a mouseburger who doesn’t realize she has the capability of becoming anything, anything at all, anything she wants to, of becoming Helen Gurley Brown, for God’s sake. And don’t you see? She is only trying to help.

  —February 1970

  Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post

  I FEEL BAD about what I’m going to do here. What I’m going to do here is write something about Dorothy Schiff, and the reason I feel bad about it is that a few months ago, I managed to patch things up with her and now I’m going to blow it. She had been irritated with me for several years because I told the story about her and Otto Preminger’s sauna on the radio, but we managed to get through a pleasant dinner recently, which made me happy—not because I care whether or not Dorothy Schiff is irritated with me but simply because I have a book coming out this summer, and if she were speaking to me, I might have a shot at some publicity in the New York Post. Ah, well. It’s not easy being a media columnist. The publicity I had in mind, actually, was this little feature the Post runs on Saturdays called “At Home With,” where semi-famous people tell their favorite recipes. Mine is beef borscht.

  Dorothy Schiff is the publisher, editor, and owner of the New York Post, America’s largest-selling afternoon newspaper. I used to work there. The Post is a tabloid that has a smaller news hole than the New York Daily News—five front pages, various parts of which are often rented out to Chock full o’ Nuts and Lüchow’s. It also has a center magazine section containing mostly Washington Post columnists, a first-rate sports section and drama critic, and Rose Franzblau, Earl Wilson, and Dear Abby. It takes about eleven minutes to read the Post, and there are more than half a million New Yorkers like me who spend twenty cents six days a week to kill eleven minutes reading it. It is probably safe to say that fewer and fewer young people read the Post, and that fewer and fewer young people understand why anyone does. It is a terrible newspaper.

  The reason it is, of course, is Dorothy Schiff. A great deal has been written about Mrs. Schiff in various places over the past years, and some of it—I’m thinking here of Gail Sheehy’s article in New York at the end of 1973—has captured perfectly her coquettish giddiness, her penchant for trivia, and her affection for gossip. It is taken for granted in these articles that Dolly Schiff is a very powerful woman—she is in fact very powerful for a woman and not particularly powerful for a newspaper publisher. What is rarely discussed is her product. In Sheehy’s article, I suppose this was partly because Mrs. Schiff had manuscript approval, and partly because the publisher of New York, like so many other men Mrs. Schiff toys with, thinks that someday he will buy the New York Post from her. But it is a major omission: There is no other big-city newspaper in America that so perfectly reflects the attitudes and weaknesses of its owner. Dorothy Schiff has a right to run her paper any way she likes. She owns it. But it seems never to have crossed her mind that she might have a public obligation to produce a good newspaper. Gail Sheehy quite cleverly compared her with Scheherazade, but it would be more apt, I think, to compare her with Marie Antoinette. As in let them read schlock.

  In 1963, when I went to work there as a reporter, the New York Post was located in a building on West Street, near the Battery. The first day I went there, I thought I had gotten out of the elevator in the fire exit. The hallway leading to the city room was black. Absolutely black. The smell of urine came wafting out of the men’s room in the middle of the long hallway between the elevator and the city room. The glass door to the city room was filmed with dust, and written on it, with a finger, was the word “Philthy.” The door was cleaned four years later, but the word remained; it had managed to erode itself onto the glass. Then, through the door, was the city room. Rows of desks jammed up against one another, headset phones, manual typewriters, stacks of copy paper, cigarette butts all over the floor—all of it pretty routine for a city room, albeit a city room of the 1920s. The problem was the equipment. The staff of the Post was small, but it was too large for the city room and for the number of chairs and desks and telephones in it. If you arrived at the Post five minutes late, there were no chairs left. You would go hunt one up elsewhere on the floor, drag it to an empty space, and then set off to find a phone. You cannot be a newspaper reporter without a phone. The phones at the Post were the old-fashioned headset type, with an earpiece-mouthpiece part that connected to a wire headpiece. Usually you could find the earpiece-mouthpiece part, but only occasionally was there a headpiece to go with it, which meant that you spent the day with your head cocked at a seventy-degree angle trying to balance this tiny phone against your shoulder as you typed. If you managed to assemble a complete telephone in the morning, it was necessary to lock it in your desk during lunch, or else it would end up on someone else’s head for the afternoon. The trouble with that was that half the staff did not have desks, much less desk drawers to lock anything in.

  None of this was supposed to matter. This was the newspaper business. You want air conditioning, go work at a newsmagazine. You want clean toilets, go work in advertising. Besides, there was still a real element of excitement to working at the New York Post in 1963. The paper had been a good paper once, when James Wechsler was the editor, and for a while it was possible to believe that it would be again. Mrs. Schiff had kicked Wechsler upstairs, had changed the focus of the paper from hard-hitting, investigative, and left-wing to frothy, gossipy, and women-oriented, but we all thought that would change eventually. At some point in the next few years, several New York papers would shut down. N
one of us really thought the Post would. “The most depressing thing about the Post,” a reporter who once worked there used to say, “is that it will never shut down.” When the other papers folded, the Post would have to get better. It would have to absorb the superior financial-page reporters from the other afternoon papers, the superior columnists from the Herald Tribune. It would have to run two more pages of news, enlarge its Washington bureau, beef up its foreign coverage, hire more staff, pay them better, stop skimping on expense accounts. Why I believed this I don’t know, but I believed it for years. The managing editor, Al Davis, who once dumped four gallons of ice water on my head in an attempt to tell me how he felt about the fact that I was leaving the Post for a while to go live in Europe, was fired in 1965, and we all had several months of euphoria thinking his replacement would make a difference. Blair Clark, the former CBS newsman and thread millionaire, came in as Mrs. Schiff’s assistant—he too thought he would be able to buy the Post from her—and we all thought he would make a difference. The Trib folded, and the Journal, and the World Journal Tribune, and we all thought that would make a difference. Nothing made a difference.

  I first met Mrs. Schiff a few weeks after I started working at the Post. I was summoned to lunch in her office, a privilege very few other reporters were granted in those days, and the reason for it had mainly to do with the fact that my parents were friends of her daughter, and I suspect she felt safe with me, thought I was of her class or some such. “You’re so lucky to be working,” she said to me at that meeting. “When I was your age, I never did anything but go to lunch.” Mrs. Schiff’s custom during these lunch meetings—perhaps as a consequence of spending so much of her youth in expensive restaurants at midday—was to serve a sandwich from the fly-strewn luncheonette on the ground floor of the Post building. A roast beef sandwich. Everyone who had lunch with her got a roast beef sandwich. Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, and me, to name a few. She thought it was very amusing of her, and I suppose it was. She would sit on one of her couches, looking wonderful-for-her-age—she is seventy-two now, and she still looks wonderful-for-her-age—and talk to whoever was on the other couch. There was, as far as I could tell, almost no way to have an actual conversation with her. She dominated, tantalized, sprinkled in little tidbits, skipped on to another topic. Once, I remember, she told me apropos of nothing that President Johnson had been up to see her the week before.

  “Do you know what he told me?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “He told me that Lady Bird fell down on the floor in a dead faint the other day, with her eyes bulging out of her head.”

  “Yes?” I said, thinking the story must go on to make a point, to relate to whatever we’d just been talking about. But that was it.

  In the course of that first meeting, I asked Mrs. Schiff a question, and her answer to it probably sums her up better than anything else she ever said to me. The newspaper strike was still on—she had walked out of the Publishers’ Association a few weeks before and had resumed publication—and I was immensely curious about what went on during labor negotiations. I didn’t know if the antagonists were rude or polite to one another. I didn’t know if they said things like “I’ll give you Mesopotamia if you’ll give me Abyssinia.” I asked her what it had been like. She thought for a moment and then answered. “Twenty-eight men,” she said. “All on my side.” She paused. “Well,” she said, “I just ran out of things to wear.”

  That was Mrs. Schiff on the 114-day newspaper strike. She took everything personally, and at the most skittishly feminine personal level. There was always debate over what made her change her endorsement from Averell Harriman to Nelson Rockefeller in the 1958 gubernatorial election, but the only explanation I ever heard that made any sense was that a few days before the election, she went to a Harriman dinner and was left off the dais. She was obsessed with personal details, particularly with the medical histories of famous persons and the family lives of Jews who intermarried. I once spent two days on the telephone trying to check out a story she heard about Madame Nhu and a nervous breakdown ten years before, and I was constantly being ordered to call back people I had written profiles on in order to insert information about whether they were raising their children as Jews or Episcopalians or whatever.

  Every little whim she had was catered to. Her yellow onionskin memos would come down from the fifteenth floor, and her editors, who operated under the delusion that their balls were in escrow, would dispatch reporters. In 1965, during the New York water shortage, she sent the one about Otto and the sauna. “Otto Preminger has added two floors to his house under my bedroom window,” she wrote. “One, I understand, is for a movie projection room and the other, a sauna bath. Frequently, I hear water running for hours on end, from the direction of the Preminger house. It would be interesting to find out if a substantial amount of water is or is not required by such luxuries. Please investigate.” The memo was given to me, and I spent the next day writing and then rewriting a memo to Mrs. Schiff explaining that saunas did not use running water. This did not satisfy her. So Joe Kahn, the Post’s only investigative reporter, was sent up to Lexington Avenue and Sixty-second Street to find the source of the sound of running water. He found nothing.

  Ultimately, I discovered what union negotiations were like. I became a member of the grievance committee and the contract committee, and the head of the plant and safety committee. About the plant and safety committee—I was also the only member of it, and I think it is accurate to say that everyone at the Post thought I was crazy even to care. It wasn’t precisely a matter of caring, though. I was physically revolted by the conditions at the newspaper, none of which had changed at all since I began there. The entrance to the lobby was still black, “Philthy” and the dust were still on the door, and there was a slowly accumulating layer of soot all over the city room. Then there were the bathrooms. They were cleaned only once a day and had overflowing wastebaskets and toilets. The men’s room in the entrance hall still had no door, and there was something wrong with the urinals. In the summertime, it was especially unpleasant to walk past it.

  I first began to bring up my complaints about plant conditions to management in the grievance committee. Mrs. Schiff was not present. I asked that the hallway be painted. I asked for a snap lock on the men’s room door. I asked for more chairs and phones in the city room. I asked if it were possible to hire a few more maintenance people—there was one poor man whose job consisted of cleaning all the bathrooms and of sweeping out the city room each day. Nothing happened. About a year after I began to complain, I was summoned to lunch again by Mrs. Schiff because of a memorandum I had written about Betty Friedan. I asked her about the possibility of cleaning the city room and repainting the entrance, and she looked at me as if the idea had never occurred to her. (The next week, the hallway was in fact painted and the city room cleaned for the first time in four years.) Then I mentioned the bathrooms, which she referred to for the rest of the conversation as the commodes. She listened to me—as just about everyone did—as if I were addled, and then said that she didn’t really see the point of keeping the commodes clean because her employees were the kind of people who were incapable of not dirtying them up. I tried to explain to her that if the plant were clean, her employees would not be careless about dirtying it. I suggested that she had exactly the same sort of people working for her as there were at the Daily News, and the bathrooms at the Daily News looked fine. I don’t think she understood a word I said.

  One more thing about that lunch. We were talking about Betty Friedan. I had written a memo about an article she had written for the magazine section of the Sunday Herald Tribune; I thought we could develop a series about women in New York from it. The memo had been sent up to Mrs. Schiff, who wanted to talk about it. It turned out that she was upset with Betty Friedan and seemed to think that The Feminine Mystique had caused her daughter, a Beverly Hills housewife, to leave her household and spend a lot of money becoming a California politi
cian. Mrs. Schiff thought I wanted to write a put-down of Mrs. Friedan—which was fine with her. I explained that that wasn’t what I had in mind at all; I agreed with Betty Friedan, I said. “For example,” I said, reaching for something I hoped Mrs. Schiff would understand, “Betty Friedan writes that housewives with nothing else to do often put a great deal of nagging pressure on their husbands to earn more money so they can buy bigger cars and houses.”

  Mrs. Schiff thought it over. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve often thought that was why the men around here ask for raises as much as they do.”

  Top pay for reporters at that time was around ten thousand dollars a year. Mrs. Schiff had no idea that it took more than that to raise a family. She had no idea how the people who worked for her lived. She did not know that one hundred dollars was not a generous Christmas bonus. She did not even have a kind of noblesse oblige. She just sat up there serving roast beef sandwiches and being silly.

  Jack Newfield, another New York Post alumnus, wrote an article about the paper in 1969 for Harper’s, and in it he quoted Blair Clark, who was then assistant publisher of the Post for a brief interlude. “Dolly’s problem,” said Clark, “is that her formative experience was the brutal competitive situation the Post used to be in. She doesn’t know how to make it a class newspaper.” In the lean years, she survived by cutting overhead, keeping the staff small, cutting down on out-of-town assignments, paying her employees as little as possible. And all this still goes on, not just because she still thinks she is in a competitive situation but also because she survived, and she did it her way. She did it by being stingy, and she did it by being frothy and giddy; she was vindicated and she sees no reason to do things differently.