Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  Kael and Didion never gave up the grudge and became friends. James Wolcott reported in a memoir that Kael loved to snicker, especially, at a quote Didion had given Alfred Kazin: “I am haunted by the Donner Party.” This was a shame. The pair could have commiserated on more subjects than just the matter of Woody Allen, for around this time Didion too started to be subjected to the kind of bizarrely personal attacks that follow success.

  One such attack was from the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, a sometime reviewer for the Nation, who wrote a piece called “Only Disconnect.” While Harrison made some good points about the unrelenting misery Didion could sometimes project, she rather undermined her own project by making fun of Quintana’s name right out of the gate.

  The other attack came somewhat later, and from a more familiar quarter: Mary McCarthy. Didion was something of a fan; she frequently quoted McCarthy in her essays on women, explicitly mentioning McCarthy’s fiction in her attacks on Helen Gurley Brown and on the women’s movement. But when McCarthy finally addressed Didion, reviewing her 1984 novel Democracy, she found only disappointment, “deathlessness”:

  Perhaps all the elements in the puzzle are out of movies. Perhaps Joan Didion is just wishing that she were an old-time screenwriter rather than a novelist. If that is it, I am irritated. To be portentous, one ought to be deeper than that.

  Silvers, at this point, seems to have decided that Didion’s fine intelligence needed better targets, subjects she could spend hours of exploratory surgery on. She and Dunne had been talking for months about going to Latin America, and she told an interviewer that in fact it was her idea to go.

  By 1982, when Didion arrived in El Salvador, there was little question the government of the country was a regime of terrifying violence. An archbishop was shot in the pulpit; massacres were being documented by photojournalists. Alma Guillermoprieto was tracking all of it in the Washington Post. Tom Brokaw told the Didion-Dunnes it was the only country in which he’d never felt safe. And so, like Sontag and Mary McCarthy before her, Didion decided to wander into a heart of darkness and see what she could find there.

  Unlike Sontag and McCarthy in Vietnam, Didion found little reason in El Salvador to examine her conscience. There was too much lying around in wait of dreadful cataloging.

  There is a special kind of practical information that the visitor to El Salvador acquires immediately, the way visitors to other places acquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums. In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth. One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point has to do with land title, stuffed with some of the dirt in question.

  It was in El Salvador that Didion began to question her techniques. In a shopping mall that “embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved,” she began to wonder if it was really a good idea to be cataloging all the consumer items being sold there, so incongruous with the murder and horror outside. The irony with which she could present them in her work no longer seemed funny, or trenchant. She would write about this explicitly in the essay she produced, feeling that she was witnessing not so much a “story” as a “noche obscura.”

  This focus on the simplicity of narrative was a point, obviously, that Didion had already made in her essay “The White Album.” To tell a story was to boil an event down to its supposed essentials, but sometimes the essentials were not a proper representation of the whole. This was a point she had first learned in writing about her own life. She would write what looked, to readers, like confessional essays about divorce, about her practice of keeping a notebook, about self-respect. But she knew what she was selecting, and what she was holding back; she knew certain elements of her story were being concealed. The public’s willingness to accept the image she projected had clearly taught her something.

  She’d go on to write extensively about politics throughout the 1980s. America had by then stabilized from the hallucinogenic, dreamlike 1960s, and had taken its conservative turn into the Reagan years. It was telling itself about “Morning in America,” and the mass media machine that was only beginning to shape the presidential elections of the 1960s and 1970s had become more sophisticated. Didion began writing about politics after the idea was put to her by Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books; he seemed to understand that narrative was Didion’s best subject, and nowhere were the narratives more bizarre than in national politics—a point that would surface repeatedly.

  It was almost as if American politics had not learned some of the lessons of her earlier work. The fact that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion had written in “The White Album,” was not exactly laudatory. It inflicted some kind of damage. The stories were, after all, self-deceptions. We used them to conceal an element of the truth from ourselves, because the whole truth was somehow unbearable, or else, especially in the case of politics, unmanageable.

  So the reporters on the failed 1988 Michael Dukakis presidential campaign were, in her view, too credulous, too willing to take the story the campaign fed them and send it back out to the public without much independent scrutiny. In that story, Dukakis was said to be “becoming presidential,” but the elements of that transformation were kept vague, with political writers apparently expecting readers to accept the narrative they were being given, no questions asked. “The narrative is made up of many such understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line,” Didion wrote. This critique of access journalism was something that was rarely seen at the time, because it could be done only by someone of Didion’s standing. Didion’s observations could not stop the collusion between reporters and the public relations people on political campaigns, but she did help make society more aware of this problem.

  While Didion’s critique of the servitude of political reporters was clearly brilliant, there was perhaps something more animating it too, a bit of personal perspective on the lives of political journalists. Long ago, at a party, she had met and befriended a young writer named Nora Ephron. Ephron had gone on to marry Carl Bernstein, one of the two reporters who had effectively impeached Nixon with their accounts of the Watergate scandal. Their courtship had not been a happy thing, but the marriage, was, at first, very solid. Bernstein was, as the muckraking of Watergate suggested, not the kind of obeisant servant of the White House party line that Didion abhorred. The two became friends; when, in the late 1980s, Bernstein would write a memoir of his Communist parents, Didion would be among the first he’d show it to.

  But things with Ephron and Bernstein would not go very well in the end.

  11

  Ephron

  The only novel Nora Ephron ever published was about Carl Bernstein and the way he’d ruined her life. The pair met in swinging 1970s New York, perhaps hitting it off because they both had somewhat combative spirits. Bernstein still had the laurels of his role in Watergate; Ephron was a bestselling feminist writer and a staple on television, already established as a kind of public wit. In tabloid terms, it was kismet, two brilliant people hitting it off. They quickly became a kind of It Couple, marrying in 1976. They were both on top of the world—until he cheated, and then they weren’t.

  This, at least, is the situation Heartburn drops you into: the blood-and-guts end of what could have been a perfectly good marriage. “The first day I did not think it was funny,” Ephron’s narrator Rachel Samstat writes. “I didn’t think it was funny the third day either, but I managed to make a little joke about it.” Or not so little, because Heartburn is one long joke, interrupted by recipes, about the despair inherent in having to leave one’s philandering husband while handling two toddlers. The narrator lacerates herself for not having noticed the affair sooner, but it is true that she is much harder on her husband. “The man is capable of having sex with a Ven
etian blind,” Ephron wrote. The book is even self-conscious about the way it skewers the husband:

  Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? And I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it!

  Heartburn was the epitome of the line Ephron always used to describe her own mission: “Everything is copy.” She’d taken a horrible experience and turned it into something everyone loved. Though it attracted a few skeptical press notices, Heartburn was a bestseller. It made Ephron temporarily rich; it got her away from Bernstein. So it served many of the purposes it was meant to serve, except one: it meant she’d always be defined by this experience. And Nora Ephron, by all accounts, did not like to dwell on anything uncomfortable. “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim,” she told a crowd of graduates at Wellesley, late in her life.

  If that line sometimes sounded both glib and inspirational, Ephron knew a little something about victims. Of all the people in this book, she was the only one with a direct connection to Dorothy Parker. Her screenwriter parents had befriended Parker in Hollywood. Ephron’s own memories of her were hazy, though Parker was in and out of the house throughout Nora’s childhood: “She was frail and tiny and twinkly.” Still the young Ephron came to idolize Parker, or at least the figure she cut. Ephron was enchanted by the idea that Parker had been “the only woman at the table,” the wit and the genius who was the life of every well-spoken party in Manhattan. She wanted to do that too. She called it her Dorothy Parker problem. Of course, a biography of Parker would later disabuse her of those illusions about Parker’s life, would fill her in on the alcoholism and the “victim.” Ephron claimed to have then abandoned the dream, albeit reluctantly. “Before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth, and I have trouble giving it up.”

  The bursting of that bubble came closer to home than Ephron admitted. Born in 1941, Nora was Phoebe and Henry Ephron’s eldest daughter of four. And by an alchemy of disposition and natural talent, the family generated plenty of text on themselves. All four sisters would eventually become writers. Three of them wrote memoirs. Henry Ephron wrote one too. The art of self-presentation began, by all accounts, at the Ephron dinner table. Nightly, there was a contest to be the funniest person in the family. In the family annals, and particularly those that Nora left behind, these were largely portrayed as jocular occasions. They taught her the liberating power of humor, she said.

  Funniest of all was her mother, Phoebe. Like Rebecca West’s mother, she was a woman of many talents. Also like Rebecca West’s mother, she had possibly married the wrong man.

  Phoebe Ephron grew up in the Bronx. She worked as a shop clerk. When she met Henry, then just an aspiring playwright, at a party, it was he who pursued her. Before she’d agree to marry him, she insisted that she get to read his work, to see if it was good enough. This was a cherished family story. She was always an authority in her own right, always holding the attention of a room. She told her daughters there were no values in life higher than independence. “If I haven’t raised you to make your own decisions, it won’t do any good to tell you what I think,” Nora recorded her mother saying to her children from the time they were very young. She lived her life as a kind of exception, too. Phoebe Ephron was, along with Parker, one of the few female screenwriters in Hollywood, and she insisted on doing things that only men did:

  She was not doctrinaire or dogmatic about it; although she named me after the heroine of The Doll’s House, she could not bear being called a feminist. She merely was, and simply by her example, we all grew up with blind faith in our own abilities and destinies.

  That all sounds adorably plucky, a perfect feminist story about someone who hated the word “feminist.” (There is also a beautiful coincidence here in both Ephron and West owing Ibsen their names.) But Ephron would reveal, later, that when she was fifteen her mother began to drink heavily. “One day she wasn’t an alcoholic,” she wrote. “And the next day she was a complete lush.” With the drinking came a good amount of screaming and fighting. (Henry also drank, and was a serial philanderer to boot.) Ephron confessed that in Phoebe’s later years, she even became frightened of her mother. Once, when Phoebe visited Wellesley, where Ephron attended college, Ephron found herself continually waiting for the other shoe to drop. To Ephron’s classmates Phoebe was something of a glamorous figure then; Ephron’s parents had written a play that was a great success on Broadway at the time. Ephron spent the night terrified her mother would start on one of her screaming jags. The alcoholism would continue for fifteen years, more or less uninterrupted, until Phoebe Ephron died at the age of fifty-seven from cirrhosis of the liver.

  The eulogy Nora Ephron gave for her would not mention all of this, because it took a very long time for Ephron to process it. Phoebe Ephron was the person who’d coined the phrase “Everything is copy.” But not everything was copy, at first. It would take until Ephron’s seventies for her to admit in print that she had wished her mother dead for a long time. Before that the story was cleaner, more idyllic, the simple passing of the talent for wisecracking from one generation to the next. Ephron often retold a certain deathbed story:

  She knew, I think, that she was dying, and she turned to me. “You’re a reporter, Nora,” she said. “Take notes.” That makes her sound tougher than she really was. She was tough—and that was good—but she was also soft, somewhat mystical, and intensely proud.

  The “Take notes” quote was something Ephron would repeat again and again, but the bit about softness—about her mother’s contradictions—mostly disappeared until Ephron wrote about her mother’s alcoholism in one of her last essay collections in 2011. So Phoebe Ephron, tough and funny as she was, taught her daughter a little something about humanity, too.

  From the time Ephron was very small, she had to build a kind of persona. Her parents took “Everything is copy” seriously, to a fault. When she was a baby, her parents wrote a play about their experiences living in the Bronx with Phoebe’s parents called Three Is a Family. It was just a light farce, meant as an evening’s entertainment, but it provoked bad reactions. When the play was made into a film, Bosley Crowther, the imperious Times movie reviewer Pauline Kael so hated, called it “strictly infantile.” Then, when Ephron was at Wellesley, her letters home inspired another play, in fact her parents’ last real hit: Take Her, She’s Mine. Evidently proud of their daughter’s wit, they couldn’t resist directly quoting her in the play:

  P.S. I’m the only one in my class still wearing a retainer on her teeth. It’s not the kind of thing I care to be individual about. Please ask Dr. Schick if it’s essential. If he says yes, I shall probably lose it.

  It debuted on Broadway while Ephron was still a college student at Wellesley in Massachusetts. The critics immediately loved it. Women’s Wear Daily called it a “Tempest of Mirth.” Variety approved of it, saying it was “told interestingly and there are knowing chuckles and substantial guffaws which pepper the dialog.” It ran for nearly a year, from 1961 to 1962. On campus, everyone knew about it.

  Ephron would report all of this with the nonchalance that was her trademark. But at a very young age, she had already had the opportunity to learn the frustration that came with being fodder for someone else’s work, having her life mined for plays and screenplays. As Joan Didion famously put it, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Ephron knew that rule at an earlier age than most people. She never spoke of it bothering her, but it informed everything she did.

  She clearly wasn’t fond of looking back, anyway. When Ephron left Wellesley to go to New York in 1962, she always said she felt she was coming home. The bulk of her childhood was spent in Beverly Hills, but she insisted she had never liked it there. She did not write much about high school, and photographs of her as a teenager make her look awkward, not at all a snappy dresser. She did not seem to ha
ve any particular professional ambitions; she was not, like Sontag, spending her teenage years pining for an imaginary Europe. When she arrived in New York she simply went to an employment agency and announced that she wished to be a journalist. The employment agency had some openings at Newsweek, but the agent told her women were not writers there.

  It would never have crossed my mind to object or to say, “You’re going to turn out to be wrong about me.” It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule.

  She lived together with a friend on Sullivan Street, in what was then known as a southern part of Greenwich Village, and moved in in the middle of a neighborhood celebration of the Feast of St. Anthony.

  The Newsweek job was not as a reporter, merely as a researcher. So it was a bit of a bust, writingwise; the closest Ephron came to bylines was seeing them on the desk of the editor in chief for whom she worked. Like so many others in this book, she got her break not from the editor of an established magazine, but rather from the editor of a smaller one, in this case a humor magazine called Monocle. The editor was Victor Navasky, who would later go on to become the editor of the Nation. Ephron met him at one of the many parties the magazine held. He found her funny. And when the newspaper strike hit in late 1962, he asked her to write a parody of what was then a famous gossip column, called the Lyons’ Den, written by Leonard Lyons. This got the attention of the editors of the New York Post, who promptly offered her a job as a reporter.

  It was the publisher of the Post, a society matron named Dorothy Schiff, who’d been impressed and suggested they grab up the talent. Schiff embodied a kind of moneyed female independence that she shared with Katharine Graham, the later publisher of the Washington Post. Ephron would later write a scathing assessment of Schiff, one so mean that she felt compelled to preface it with: “I feel bad about what I’m going to do here.” But without Schiff, there never would have been the Nora Ephron that America came to know. Being a reporter first and a writer second was an important part of Ephron’s persona in those years. She alternated the people she’d say inspired her to become a journalist. Sometimes she’d say it was Hildy Johnson in the 1930s comedy His Girl Friday. Ephron liked jokes and she liked comedy. She viewed them as essential survival skills. And that meant early on that Ephron knew she wanted to be an observer rather than a participant in public affairs: