Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  Gloria Steinem, then at the height of her media visibility as an actual feminist leader, did not come off much better when seen through Ephron’s lens. Though she was more high-handed than Friedan, she had friends who did the dirty work for her. And when Steinem was left behind by George McGovern, who had made her certain promises about the Democratic party platform, she cried about it. Ephron is not so much critical of Steinem’s crying—as she was of Helen Gurley Brown’s—as she is mystified by the occasion for it. “I have never cried over anything remotely political in my life, and I honestly have no idea what to say.”

  Ephron told an interviewer that this bit of reporting—her simple mention of Steinem’s tears—got her friends “yelling and screaming at me.” Some of them were angry for years.

  Yet for most, Ephron’s sympathetic but skeptical tone worked well. We have a habit, now, of assuming that people had only one kind of reaction to the women’s movement: either they were all in, or they were all out. But the second wave was not, as its critics like Didion sometimes framed it, a united front. Its internal politics were fractious, with arguments about the way age and race and any number of other intrafeminine fault lines inflected this business of “being a woman.” Any real person, looking at all that, had to have a conflicted take on it all. It was possible to feel extreme, uncontrollable surges of hope and disappointment.

  All those conflicted feelings are perhaps what made Ephron such a resonant spokesperson about all of it: she could be cutting about the movement’s absurdities and ugliness, but she was doing so from the position of an insider. And though she was gentle, occasionally she would offer corrections to the elisions of the critics. In one column, she distinguished herself from Didion’s insistence that life as a woman would involve “blood, birth and death,” a definition she called “extraordinary and puzzling.” Didion and Ephron had, by then, become friendly, as they ran in all the same circles. Perhaps Ephron was a good influence. Asked about her position on the women’s movement in the 1990s, Didion seemed to retract her earlier critique.

  I think that piece was about a specific moment in time. I thought the women’s movement was becoming mired in the trivial, that it was going in a direction that wasn’t the ideal direction, that it had hit a wall and kept talking about small things. Trivialization wore itself out, though, and the movement managed to survive, not so much as a movement anymore, but as a changed way of life.

  Ephron obviously had had no problem talking about women’s bodies; there was, after all, the article about breasts. She had also written, in early 1973, a long investigative piece called “Dealing with the uh, Problem,” which had gamely explored the manufacturing, use, and marketing of the feminine odor spray—i.e., “a deodorant for the external genital area (or, more exactly, the external perineal area).” Her detachment suited her well here, for with very little editorializing she managed to make the whole business seem so ridiculous.

  It was easy to write about the ridiculous things men said and did to women, harder to write about the ridiculous things women did to themselves. She found herself arguing one day with Susan Brownmiller about wearing makeup. The divisions in the movement were terribly apparent by that point, and she had worked the experience into the Shulman piece, without attaching a name:

  Once I tried to explain to a fellow feminist why I liked wearing makeup; she replied by explaining why she does not. Neither of us understood a word the other said.

  One column wrestled directly with this alternating enthusiasm for and ambivalence about the movement. She found it difficult to be at once committed to it and to be a writer. One of the “recurring ironies of this movement is that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.” She found it difficult she said, to review books by women about the second-wave feminist movement because although she agreed with their passions, she didn’t really like the way those women wrote. She knew she was supposed to count their good intentions into the final critical calculus, of course:

  This is what’s known in the women’s movement as sisterhood, and it is good politics, I suppose, but it is not good criticism. Or honesty. Or the truth. (Furthermore, it is every bit as condescending as the sort of criticism men apply to books about women these days—that unconsciously patronizing tone that treats books by and about women as some sort of sub-genre of literature, outside the mainstream, not quite relevant, interesting really, how-these-women-dogo-on-and-we-really-must-try-to-understand-what-theyare-getting-at-whatever-it-is.)

  There was, of course, something of self-criticism in this, for there was something ultimately sort of patronizing about Esquire sectioning off its analysis of women from the rest of the magazine, too, not to mention that the magazine targeted men as its readers and did not have nearly as wide a circulation among women. And something was ultimately wasteful about keeping Ephron writing only about that. Later she’d say it was her decision to quit writing the columns, that she’d grown tired of it, said what she needed to say.

  But the subject continued to provide her with copy for some time after that. She was poached by New York magazine. There she was to keep writing pieces about women. In the first of those, she attacked a friend, the writer Sally Quinn, for saying she had always used flirting as a reporting technique. And in analyzing her anger over Quinn’s remark, Ephron mentioned what a recent interviewee, and growing friend, had to say about the matter of women and professional competition:

  “Dashiell Hammett used to say I had the meanest jealousy of all,” Miss [Lillian] Hellman said. “I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn’t know how to do it.”

  For New York Ephron began to return to an older form for her: the simple takedown of prominent media figures. Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, decided to launch a magazine for women called Viva in 1973, with the tagline: “Brought to you by men who unashamedly enjoy women.” In the column you can practically see Ephron’s excitement as she gets to lay bare the particular contours of Guccione’s ignorance, quoting him at length and without comment just as she had done to Dick Cavett and Helen Gurley Brown:

  As near as possible, everything considered, I hate to say it but I think it’s true, I know women better than women know themselves.

  Viva would last seven years after this, but it would not become the kind of emblematic publication that women cited to each other, contrary to Guccione’s dreams and hopes.

  The next person Ephron went after was Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who Ephron found to be a phony. In the aftermath of Watergate, attractive Julie tended to be the person the Nixons put in front of the press. The Washington press corps, as Ephron chronicles, was practically in love with her.

  As one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying. They will tell you she is approachable, which is true, and that she is open, which is not … It is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.

  This statement may have some personal bite in it, because once Phoebe Ephron was dead, Henry Ephron had become the burden of his daughters. He began to write a memoir he called We Thought We Could Do Anything, a title he took directly from the eulogy his daughter had given for her mother. Ephron later insisted the memoir was full of nonsense. Moreover, it seemed like a naked attempt to capitalize on the growing fame of his eldest daughter, which must have bothered her.

  Nora Ephron was by now famous. She was appearing in the society gossip rag she’d excoriated years before, Women’s Wear Daily, quite frequently—more frequently even than Helen Gurley Brown had. She was on television often. On one show, the host brought up the way she often cut people to the quick.

  Host: You can be malevolent, can’t you?

  Ephron: Oh, sure.

  Host: It’s kind of fun to be malevolent, isn�
��t it?

  Ephron: No, you’re—

  Host: I’ll tell you something you were malevolent in.

  Your piece on Julie Nixon.

  Ephron: You have a soft spot for Julie Nixon.

  Host: I like Julie, yes.

  Ephron: Well, I don’t. I think she’s a chocolate-covered spider.

  This was the frame that almost all Ephron’s subsequent pieces would take. At some point she’d return to Esquire, where instead of women her targets became the media, and many individuals she knew in the media: People magazine, Theodore White, the pretensions of certain New Yorker writers. (She didn’t mention Kael in that piece.) At one point, caught up in a dispute Esquire had with the writer Richard Goodwin, she even hit back at Esquire. She wrote a column criticizing its decision to settle with Goodwin over a profile of him she had edited for the magazine.

  This aspect of Ephron’s life—what some have called her meanness—seems not to have been totally apparent to readers at the time. It was sometimes not even apparent to Ephron herself. Interviewed by the Associated Press when Crazy Salad was published in 1975, Ephron said:

  You can write the most wonderful piece in the world about someone and the only word they’ll see is “plump” … You learn very early that you’re not in this business to be friends with the people you write about. If you are, you start pulling punches.

  The dilemma she articulated here was one she felt acutely in her own writing. By the time Ephron was a household name, the men occasionally appeared to be sniping back at her in columns, calling her brainy and cute instead of brilliant, opining on how much they’d like to sleep with her. She saw that this affected what she was asked to write and what she was asked to think about in her career as an essayist. She told an interviewer in 1974 that “there are certain magazines that will not assign pieces to women or even think of women in connection with certain subjects such as economics or politics.”

  “Being single is a distraction,” a freshly divorced Nora Ephron also said to that interviewer in 1974. (She was briefly married to another humor writer, Dan Greenburg, in the early 1970s.) “I mean one of the things about marriage that is good for both men and women is that it frees you from all that energy that you use to put into dating. You can put it into work. You don’t have to worry about who is going to take you to the dinner party tomorrow. It takes time to be single, it seems to me.” Bernstein ended that.

  For whatever reason, Ephron’s connection with Bernstein happened at the same time as a sudden decline in her interest in writing for magazines. In fact, her writing dropped off almost entirely in the latter half of the 1970s, as she turned her attention to screenplays. She began collaborating with Alice Arlen on Silkwood, and after what was apparently a somewhat rocky courtship, she married Carl Bernstein. “We decided to get married on Sunday, we got married on Wednesday, and the perfect part was that we made the decision to get married while we were on the Eastern shuttle,” she said to an interviewer. But she also told him that “the test of whether a marriage works is not necessarily whether it lasts forever.”

  As we know from Heartburn, it didn’t last forever. “I’m terrible about making stuff up,” she’d say when interviewers asked if she had any intentions of writing fiction. But she also said that from the moment she left her second husband she kind of knew she would write about the experience. The husband of the woman Bernstein had been cheating with—his name was Peter—asked her to lunch:

  We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh, Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”

  “It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”

  I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.

  Ephron said she eventually realized that the thing her mother had repeated throughout her life, “Everything is copy,” was a matter of control:

  When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

  I think that’s what she meant.

  Heartburn became a giant bestseller, making Ephron rich. She wrote the screenplay for the film version, to be directed by her friend Mike Nichols. Bernstein was, by all accounts, furious. He made it a condition of their divorce that the film not portray him as anything other than a loving father. Some of her friends apparently thought the move in bad taste too; in a gossipy New York magazine article that came out just before the novel appeared, her first husband, Dan Greenburg, told the reporter: “Nora is a much classier person and a much better writer than is evident in this book.”

  The book has become a kind of legend now, notwithstanding the fact the movie never quite lived up to the cleverness of the novel, perhaps because Bernstein imposed conditions on the adaptation for the sake of the couple’s two children, and perhaps because a movie cannot easily replicate the consciousness of one funny narrator the way a novel can. Too much was dependent on the Rachel character sounding just like Nora, having the same gimlet-eyed way of looking at the world and at her situation, and that interiority was too hard for even Meryl Streep to pull off on-screen. But it was one of the great pop acts of feminist revenge, one that not all the treacly films Ephron would make in her late career could quite gloss over.

  12

  Arendt & McCarthy & Hellman

  For the last few years of her life, Hannah Arendt was teaching and publishing at the enviable pace that is possible only for someone who has reached a place of profound comfort in her life. But that changed in October 1970.“HEINRICH DIED SUNDAY OF A HEART ATTACK,” Arendt told McCarthy in a telegram. McCarthy was then living in Paris with her last husband, Jim West, a diplomat. She flew to New York immediately for the funeral.

  Arendt and Blücher had, by then, been together for more than thirty years. She was bereft without him. “I am now sitting in Heinrich’s room and using his typewriter,” she wrote to McCarthy not long after his death. “Gives me something to hold on to.” And in fact, she would not last very long without him. On December 4, 1975, Arendt died of a heart attack herself as she was having dinner with friends.

  McCarthy was named Arendt’s literary executor, and she also put herself in charge of the funeral arrangements, negotiating with the family. In another sort of friendship, this might have been unusually intimate, but this was the kind where the best friend was the natural mourner in chief. In New York, McCarthy gave a eulogy in which she talked of Arendt sometimes in the mode of a lover, praising her looks, the way she’d lie on a sofa and think. She even talked about Arendt’s legs and ankles in a way that would get her mocked. But it fitted if you considered McCarthy described her friend as someone who embodied thought:

  The first time I heard her speak in public—nearly thirty years ago, during a debate—I was reminded of what Bernhardt must have been or Proust’s Berma, a magnificent stage five, which implies a goddess. Perhaps a chthonic goddess, or a fiery one, rather than the airy kind. Unlike other good speakers, she was not at all an orator. She appeared, rather, as a mime, a thespian, enacting a drama of mind, that dialogue of me-and-myself she so often summons up in her writings.

  McCarthy then gave up over two years of her own writing time to work on compiling and editing Arendt’s last project. It was to be a three-volume treatise called The Life of the Mind. The first volume would consider the act of thinking, the second the act of willing, and the third the act of judging. Arendt had substantially completed drafts of only the first two parts, and left, for the third, just two epigraphs on a sheet of paper still in her typewriter when she died. Though McCarthy’s German was not good and fundamentally she was no theorist, she considered it a matter of honor to finish the book. And she did, though the publisher paid her only a quarter of the advance and royalties to do so, the rest going to Arendt’s extended family.

  It was an act of extraordinary generosity. Time is the one t
hing artists covet most; as Sontag once remarked, it’s the main thing they use money to buy. But in the last twenty years of her life, McCarthy was not producing as much work as she once did. She finished one novel, Cannibals and Missionaries, which was to be her last. Arendt’s death, and later Robert Lowell’s, depressed her. She was still a figure of considerable influence—though Cannibals and Missionaries is not her best work, it got favorable reviews—but she was floundering a bit in search of a real role.

  Perhaps this explained what then happened with Lillian Hellman.

  Hellman was, to say the least, a complicated person. Her first great success as a writer was a play called The Children’s Hour, in which children accuse two teachers at a boarding school of lesbianism. The success of the play, and the contracts she could subsequently command in Hollywood because of it, made Hellman rich. Her wealth and fame were, however, an odd match for her politics. Like Parker, whom she befriended in Hollywood, Hellman was a leftist activist in her youth. Unlike Parker, Hellman tended to lie about that. Hellman was widely believed to have lied to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s when she testified that she had no current link to the Communist Party, or indeed “any political group.” Her testimony rescued her from the jail time served by more honest witnesses, like Hellman’s partner, Dashiell Hammett. The whole affair made her very unpopular with left intellectual types like McCarthy and her friends.

  As to any personal animus, McCarthy had met Hellman only twice. The first time was at a lunch at Sarah Lawrence College, where McCarthy taught for a while in 1948. There, she overheard Hellman bashing John Dos Passos to a group of students, saying he’d abandoned the anti-Fascists during the Spanish Civil War because he hated Spanish food. McCarthy, never one to let an opportunity for correction pass her by, pointed out that in fact Dos Passos had said in his writings that he had become disenchanted because of the murder of a friend. McCarthy saw Hellman’s anger at the time, she wrote to a friend in 1980: