Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate. What separates me from what I write about is, I suspect, a sense of the absurd that makes it difficult for me to take many things terribly seriously.

  There was absurdity aplenty, apparently, at the New York Post. Although she would always credit the place with having taught her how to report and how to write quickly, she did not like the facilities. The entire office was filthy; reporters did not have assigned desks and had to fight for their spots anew each day. But Ephron had an innate toughness, perhaps inherited from or even cultivated by her mother. She seemed to flourish under the challenge. She reported on everything: a great deal of crime, quite a few profiles of local politicians, even one of a hot new young writer named Susan Sontag. (The article is pedestrian; they talked about life in the spotlight, about Sontag’s stepfather and how he told her she’d never marry if she read too much.)

  But the work was not always good. Schiff, who was not particularly serious about either her paper’s reputation or her own, was a recurring source of oddity and anxiety. She was cheap and did not like to be generous to her employees. Schiff was the only woman publisher in New York at the time, but she was no feminist. She disliked Betty Friedan because she worried that reading the Feminine Mystique had encouraged her daughter to leave her husband and get into politics. Once, Dorothy Schiff tried to get Ephron to investigate whether the director Otto Preminger, who lived next door to Schiff, had installed a sauna in his apartment. As evidence of this possibility, Schiff said she could hear running water at all hours of the day. Ephron patiently sent her a memorandum explaining that saunas did not employ running water. Schiff assigned the story to another investigative reporter. He couldn’t find anything either.

  It bears mentioning that we know so many stories about the absurdity of Dorothy Schiff—an absurdity that might otherwise have sunk from the historical record—because Nora Ephron herself recorded them. Long after she left the Post, Ephron listed not only all Schiff’s bad qualities but also the shortcomings of the newspaper, in a media column she was writing for a magazine. In the column she said that although she had recently patched things up with Schiff after telling the Preminger story on the radio, she was going to attack Schiff again. Mostly because the Post was a “bad newspaper,” and because Schiff was the Marie Antoinette who helmed it: “As in let them read schlock.”

  The very quality of detachment that had made Ephron a good reporter also made her quite willing to attack her employers. Over the years, her willingness to anger the people she knew, to attack them the same way Kael or West or any of her predecessors had, would become a professional asset. The ferocity of her remarks about, say, Julie Nixon Eisenhower—”I think she’s a spider”—is what got her on television and made her reputation as a social critic. This was all long before she became known as the warmer, more forgiving writer of 1980s romantic comedies, but on some level detachment was a habit that never left her. “I think she was more devoted to language than to people,” the actress Meg Ryan once said.

  Ephron went freelance after she left the Post. Sensing a good reviewer in the making, the first place that really began to make use of her talents was the New York Times Book Review. It was there that she published a parody of Ayn Rand’s Hemingway-with-a-traumatic-brain-injury prose style:

  Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face painted, his hair the color of a bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean, planes, Howard Roark laughed.

  Every subject the Times gave her, she tore into with great appetite. Dick Cavett, the host of a talk show where writers argued about concepts that were over his carefully coiffed head, got an early Nora Ephron profile. His manager called Cavett Mr. Television, which at first seemed to embarrass Cavett. But his repudiation of the title, and his self-criticism, took up four long, trivia-laden paragraphs, which Ephron quoted without interruption to give a sense of Cavett’s self-absorption:

  I also got letters asking me why I always wore the same tie. I don’t. I have two ties.

  She wrote an appreciation of Rex Reed, the journalist who would later become a film critic, by calling him “a saucy, snoopy, bitchy man who sees with sharp eyes and succeeds in making voyeurs of us all.” These, she made clear, were all qualities that pleased her in a writer.

  Nonetheless, Ephron did not collect a lot of these early pieces, and reading them against her other work one suspects the problem, usually, was that the editor assigned her a banal subject. In 1969, she wrote the piece “Where Bookmen Meet to Eat” for the New York Times chronicling the easy-to-parody subject of the long publishing lunches to which agents, book editors, and writers are prone. The piece goes over the subject with a delicate hand, even though at the end Ephron manages to convince one agent to admit that “lunch is two hours out there in the world that could be spent returning telephone calls.”

  Of course, she had to be careful to preserve her own ability to make a living. In interviews from and after that period she describes herself as having just enough to live on, no more than ten thousand dollars a year before 1974. Ephron, like Sontag before her, wrote for women’s magazines for money, especially Cosmopolitan. These pieces were not always enjoyable to write, because, as she put it, they could not be done at the “intellectual level that is most satisfying to me as a writer.” There is some reason to suspect they were also the pieces that drove her toward the women’s movement, out of sheer frustration with the work she was getting, especially from Helen Gurley Brown. The opportunities there were what you’d expect: articles about makeovers, travel, sex, Copacabana showgirls.

  But Gurley Brown did let Ephron do one thing that broke out of Cosmopolitan’s usual peppy mold. Perhaps feeling hurt by how the fashion tabloid Women’s Wear Daily had frequently written about her—it often chronicled Gurley Brown’s career as a magazine editor in less than flattering terms—she allowed Ephron to write about it. Ephron laid waste to its editorial pretensions. It was a gossip rag, she wrote, targeting a narrow audience called “The Ladies,” whose pampered lives she mercilessly pilloried: “There was something a little embarrassing about just doing nothing and having lunch in between.” She said the magazine was a “surrogate bitch,” a kind of excuse to make fun of the appearance of the famous while calling it journalism.

  Ephron was taking down the magazine in its own style: its habit of adopting a confiding, giggling persona to cover up the undermining remarks it made about professional women, about the way they looked and the way they dated and the way they managed their professional affairs. Women’s Wear Daily, not noticing the ironic resemblance in tone and style, threatened to sue, Ephron wrote later.

  But—and perhaps Helen Gurley Brown should have seen this coming—in writing for Cosmopolitan she was also gathering material on the magazine itself, and more specifically its editor. Ephron’s writings had caught the eye of the editors at Esquire. The first Ephron piece they ever published was a profile of Gurley Brown, one that sought to highlight her worst personality traits. In the profile, Ephron takes the view that Gurley Brown’s problem was not her bad habit of crying when confronted with criticism, nor was it the potential corruption of morals her critics often identified when she advised young women, for example, to date married men. Instead, she went after her former editor for something that perhaps only a former writer for the magazine could see so clearly: the way Gurley Brown insulted the intelligence of women, generally:

  She is demonstrating, rather forcefully, that there are well over a million women who are willing to spend sixty cents to read not about politics, not about the female liberation movement, not about the war in Vietnam, but merely about how to get a man.

  This a
rgument bears some resemblance to Didion’s view of Helen Gurley Brown. Didion complained in her article about the vulgarity of a popular magazine editor who wants to be “the little princess, the woman who has fulfilled the whispered promise of her own books and of all the advertisements, the girl to whom things happen.” But Ephron didn’t write from the standpoint of a superior, disdainful mind; she understood, in a way Didion did not, the appeal of this frivolity. She therefore came at Gurley Brown from a more democratic place. She admitted she was among Cosmopolitan’s readers and writers. “How can you be angry at someone who’s got your number?” Ephron asked. The sympathy was initially lost on Gurley Brown. She hated the article and especially the picture printed with it, but within a few days forgave Ephron.

  The next targets of Ephron’s ire were Erich Segal, the Yale classics professor who had written the bestselling novel Love Story, and the poet Rod McKuen. Ephron professed herself a lover of trash, and particularly the novels of Jacqueline Susann. “I have never believed that kitsch killed,” she averred. But she could not abide Segal’s and McKuen’s sentimentality. She also could not abide their public personas, especially Segal’s. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was competing with Segal for a space on the bestseller lists at the time, and Segal made a habit of giving speeches condemning Roth’s graphic depictions of sex. (Perhaps unusually for a trashy book, Love Story has no sex scenes at all.) Ephron looked on in disbelief:

  Everyone loves Erich’s speech. Everyone, that is, but Pauline Kael, the film critic, who heard an earlier version of Erich’s speech at a book-and-author luncheon in Richmond, Virginia, and told him afterward that he was knocking freedom of speech and sucking up to his audience. To which Erich replied, “We’re here to sell books, aren’t we?”

  This ability to speak from inside a wide phenomenon, to know how it catered to and tricked the basest aspects of one’s personality, and then to be able to criticize it from the perspective of an insider would make Ephron a better chronicler of the 1970s—and especially the women’s movement—than just about anyone else. She was inside and outside at once, a detached person who was always in the middle of it all. She had a perceptive gift, and it was best put to use in those years. Of course, Ephron’s fame as a filmmaker would eclipse almost all her work as a writer. But it was her writing that left the indelible mark of her actual personality, her capacity to size people up and, when they really needed it, cut them down with aplomb. It made her the kind of friend people were proud to have, eager to please, and mildly afraid of. And it made this early work of hers all very brilliant.

  For most of her career, Ephron wrote in the first person and all her life, because of her early training as a reporter, she felt a little dirty doing it. Originally, she needed to be prodded by her editors, having been trained at the Post not to make herself the story. But when she came to collect her early pieces in a book called Wallflower at the Orgy, in 1970, she confessed she had chafed somewhat at the restriction.

  There are times when I am seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to blurt out, in the middle of interviews, “Me! Me! Me! Enough about you. What about me?”

  Years later, after she had been interviewed six ways from Sunday as a truly famous person, this bit of youthful vanity would embarrass her. But no piece offered so complete a sense of Ephron herself, of her voice and her perspective, as the article she would write in 1972 for Esquire, “A Few Words About Breasts.”

  The subject demands an observation: Ephron was unusually flat chested. Apparently it ran in the family; she records her caustic mother, upon being asked by her daughters to purchase a first bra, saying: “Why not use a Band-Aid instead?”

  Women engaged in a continuous game of “competitive remarks made about breast size,” Ephron wrote. She confessed to having obsessed over the subject, an obsession that extended to purchasing the kind of snake-oil bust enhancement systems that were everywhere in the seventies and eighties. A college boyfriend’s mother implied to her, in conversation, that she would never be able to satisfy sexually because of this disability. Ephron ended on a note that would become her signature move: a consideration of all the alternative arguments against her experience, the people who insisted that smaller breasts actually made clothes fit better, occasioned less teasing. This was a gesture at the objectivity of journalism, something Ephron said she never believed in, even before she was afraid to write completely from the “I.” And then she punctured it all:

  I have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of shit.

  It may mean something that this article, published in the May 1972 Esquire, was the first thing Ephron published after her mother’s death. It brought in mail to the magazine.

  After the piece about her breasts, Esquire offered Ephron a column. Over the years, conflicting things were said about whether it was Ephron’s idea or the magazine editors’ that the column should focus on women. Whoever can take the full credit, it was an excellent match.

  Ephron had already been into the women’s movement for some time when she began writing, which meant she had already gathered a fair number of observations. Her first column explored a question that haunts the writings of nearly every feminist, though few at the time were willing to say it out loud: would the feminist revolution spark a change in the way men and women sexually fantasized about each other? Ephron still had enough dignity, she thought, to avoid saying precisely what her own fantasies were, but they involved domination, and she knew already that feminists were not meant to want to be dominated in sex with men. She left the column open-ended, not having any real answer, but offered a self-conscious final paragraph:

  Writing a column on women in Esquire is, I realize, a little like telling a Jewish joke to a bunch of Irish Catholics. The criticisms I may make of the movement will seem doubly disloyal; the humor I hope to bring to the subject will seem flippant in this context.

  Ephron was indeed wading into enemy territory, at least to a degree. The Esquire of the time was less celebrity-driven than it is now, and considered itself more of a literary magazine than a fashion one. But Ephron’s columns were unique. She was not, like Sontag and Didion, viewing the movement from a distance, criticizing it in the abstract. Neither was she plunging headlong into it, in the sense that she did not so much see her columns as an effort to endorse any platforms.

  The first hit she landed was on another writer, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the popular novel Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen. The book was a bestseller in its time, opening with the main character’s account of being raped by her first husband. It turns from there to its real subject: the perils of beauty in a male-dominated culture: “If I could know for sure I was still beautiful, I thought, it would be easy to leave.” Shulman went on to claim that in fact beautiful people had just as many problems as ugly people, only different ones. She used, among others, Marilyn Monroe as an example of beautiful suffering.

  Ephron, having never been considered much of a beauty, found this line of argument hard to take. “There isn’t an ugly girl in America who wouldn’t exchange her problems for the problems of being beautiful,” she insisted, including herself:

  “They say it’s worse to be ugly,” Alix Shulman writes. Yes, they do say that. And they’re right. It’s also worse to be poor, worse to be orphaned, worse to be fat. Not just different from rich, familied and thin—actually worse.

  This piece thus punctured a line that had been quite popular within the women’s movement itself, where Shulman was an established figure who had published in Ms. magazine the marriage contract she’d made with her husband, in which every domestic task imaginable was enumerated and allocated to each party in the marriage. No one else took her to task in quite this way, though Didion had offered Shulman’s marriage contract as evidence of the growing obsession with trivial matters in the women’s movement. But Ephron was not using Shulman as a reason to reject the whole; in fact, she tried to end
this ripper of a piece on a slightly more sympathetic note. She was being unfair to Shulman, she said, and even to the movement. “I’m working on it,” she said. “Like all things about liberation, sisterhood is difficult.”

  Sisterhood Is Difficult could have been an alternative title for the collection of these columns. (Ephron went instead with Crazy Salad when she published it in 1975.) The fact was that most of the essays see Ephron struggling to describe the movement—not the principles underlying feminism, but the way they were being articulated by actual women out in the world—in happy terms. One column was spent reporting from the 1972 Miami Democratic Convention, where Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were butting heads. The goal of feminist activists at the convention was to get some concessions on the Democratic party platform, but instead, as Ephron watched, they managed to get very little done beyond infighting. What was happening wasn’t pretty, and Ephron had to describe it, especially Friedan’s anger at the way a younger generation was sidelining her:

  It’s her baby, damn it. Her movement. Is she supposed to sit still and let a beautiful thin lady run off with it?