Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  “The crisis will emerge … around fifty,” she said. “And although its wallop will be greater, the jolt may be just what is needed to prod the resigned middle-ager toward seeking revitalization.”

  “I’m sick of all this talk about my crisis!” Clay Filter shouted. “I’m too old to have a crisis!”

  “It’s never too late to have a crisis,” she said. “Anyway, darling, don’t think of it as a crisis. Think of it as a passage. Does that help?”

  “No, it doesn’t help!” he shouted. “Crisis is a perfectly good word. Why coin another?”

  At moments like this, she wondered whether he might not turn out to be an exception to all her theories. He had an explosive temper. Perhaps he would spend his crisis in little bursts, piggyback one mini-crisis atop another and avoid the big bang. Just the other night, unaccountably, he had blown up at her for using piggyback as a verb. Then, when she defended herself, he threatened to rip the italic bar from her typewriter. Outbursts like that were becoming more frequent. She realized it was more important than ever for her to be supportive in order to help him find his way up the developmental ladder.

  “Each one of us has our own step-style,” she said one day as he stared, preoccupied, at the rug, “the characteristic manner in which we attack the tasks of development and react to the efforts we make. Some of us take a series of cautious steps forward, then one or two back, then a long skip up to a higher level. There are those of us who thrive on setting up sink-or-swim situations.… Others, when face to face with each task, side step it for a time in a flurry of extraneous activity.”

  “Do you think I should buy The Village Voice?” he asked, looking up.

  “This could be your long skip up to a higher level,” she replied.

  “I don’t know anything about money,” he said.

  “On the other hand,” she said, “this could be your flurry of extraneous activity.”

  “This isn’t my flurry of extraneous activity,” he said. “That comes later, when I recklessly fly off to the Bahamas.”

  “Then perhaps it’s your sink-or-swim activity.”

  “I think I’ll let Felix make the deal,” said Clay Filter.

  She made a note for a new syndrome. She would call it You Can Turn Over the Closing to the Broker, But YOU Pay the Mortgage. She would tell him about it at some point, but now he had fallen asleep.

  Some months later, when he awoke, he discovered that Felix had got things backward. In the course of buying The Village Voice for Clay Filter’s magazine, Felix had accidentally sold Filter’s magazine to The Village Voice. This was an extremely confusing turn of events. Confusing turns of events often precipitate crises. Just as often, they do not. It is possible that had Clay Filter realized either of these points, he might have been able to avert what was to happen. Instead, he started a new magazine and began flying back and forth across the country each week. He was spreading himself too thin, except for the aforementioned part of him that was simply spreading itself. One morning, after he stepped off the Red Eye from Los Angeles, he was forced to stand for two hours in the freezing cold at Kennedy airport, and when he finally got a taxi, the driver was surly and unpleasant and a reader of Cue. This so infuriated Filter that he marched into a board of directors meeting and demanded a raise, two houses and a limousine. The board of directors, already upset about the profit picture, turned Filter down in an extremely acrimonious session and then went off to plot ways to sell their stock.

  “I think I’m having a crisis,” he said to her that night.

  “Don’t be silly, darling,” she replied. “You merely had a bad cabdriver.”

  When the crisis finally began, he recklessly flew off to the Bahamas. When he returned, he lost his temper and alienated the principal stockholder, who decided to sell out to an Australian. In the end, Clay Filter got one and a half million dollars and the love and devotion of several dozen employees who had previously been ambivalent toward him. But he lost his magazine, and his magazine was his life. He had offers, and he had ideas, and he would return, but there was a nagging part of himself—the part of himself physiologists call the Brain—that suspected that all of this could have been avoided. He suggested this to her.

  “Wrong, darling, wrong,” she said. “All of it was necessary. And more than that, it was thrilling. It was so predictable. The wallop. The jolt. Just what is needed to prod the resigned middle-ager toward seeking revitalization.” She smiled. “Oh, darling,” she said. “I’m so happy for you.”

  April, 1977

  Double-Crostics

  It is one of the great surprises of my adult life that I am not particularly good at doing the Double-Crostic. When I was growing up, I thought that being able to do the Double-Crostic was an adult attribute, not unlike buying hard-cover books, and that eventually I would grow into it. My mother, who was indirectly responsible for this misapprehension, was a whiz at Double-Crostics and taught me how to do them. In those days, the Double-Crostic was available through three sources: every week in the Saturday Review, every other week in the New York Times Magazine and twice a year in a Simon and Schuster anthology containing fifty or so new puzzles. The first two puzzles in each anthology were geared to beginners—to idiots, to be more precise—and I could usually solve one of them in about a month, using an atlas, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a Bartlett’s and an occasional tip from my mother, who would never have been caught dead using any source material at all. There are many things I will never forgive my mother for, but heading the list is the fact that she did the Double-Crostic in ink.

  Back then, the Double-Crostic was called the Kingsley Double-Crostic after Elizabeth S. Kingsley, who invented the form and eventually passed the puzzle-making on to Doris Nash Wortman. I had a very clear idea of what Mesdames Kingsley and Wortman looked like: jolly fat gray-haired ladies with large bosoms and cameo brooches and voluminous silk dresses covered with little flowers. As it turns out, I was right. Mrs. Wortman was succeeded in 1967 by one Thomas H. Middleton, and until I began researching this column, I had always imagined that he was Mrs. Wortman’s loyal disciple, a faithful fan who had spent years corresponding with her and sending in his own constructions to be printed in the fans section in Double-Crostic anthologies. Presumably he had been rewarded upon her death with the puzzles. As it turns out, I was wrong. He got the job by being Norman Cousins’s brother-in-law.

  I called up Thomas Middleton the other day to find out about his life. He told me that he lives in Brentwood, in Los Angeles, that he is an actor and can currently be seen in a Life Savers commercial, and that George C. Scott loves Double-Crostics. He said he constructs one hundred seventy-five puzzles a year himself and in addition writes a column on language for the Saturday Review in which he has twice tackled the subject of “hopefully.” “My feeling is that ‘hopefully’ is here to stay,” he said. In short, it wasn’t much of a phone call, and I came away from it with the impression that Middleton regards the making of Double-Crostics as a job, not a passion. This made perfect sense—ever since he took them over, I have regarded the solving of Double-Crostics as a job, not a passion—but it hardly seemed fair. In any case, I got quite sentimental about Elizabeth Kingsley and Doris Nash Wortman, about whom I knew next to nothing, and set about learning a bit.

  Elizabeth Seelman Kingsley was born in Brooklyn in about 1878 and grew up working scrambled-word puzzles in St. Nicholas magazine; after graduating from Wellesley in 1898, she became an English teacher until her marriage. During the national crossword-puzzle binge of the 1920s, she worked several crosswords and then remarked: “How futile! There is a certain fun in the thrill of the puzzle, to be sure, but what is the goal?” A few years later, at a Wellesley reunion, she became so disturbed at the undergraduates’ enthusiasm for James Joyce and Gertrude Stein that she determined to do something about it. “Suddenly it dawned upon me,” she said years later, “that a puzzle which stimulated the imagination and heightened an appreciation of fine literature by reviewing
English and American poetry and prose masters would be a puzzle with a goal.” Thus was born the first Double-Crostic, and in 1934 Mrs. Kingsley sold her first puzzle—and the rights to the name—to the Saturday Review of Literature.

  It is not easy to describe a Double-Crostic, but basically it consists of a series of definitions to which one supplies answers. The letters of the answers are transferred into a diagram that eventually spells out a quotation from a work of literature. The initials of the correct answers spell out the author’s name and the work from which the quote is taken, and if you have managed to follow this so far, you will no doubt have figured out that Mrs. Kingsley’s puzzles relied heavily on the works of Shakespeare, Keats, Defoe and the like and utterly shunned Joyce, Stein and any other writer she thought of as less than a master.

  Mrs. Kingsley, who was widowed, lived for many years in the Henry Hudson Hotel in Manhattan, where she worked out her puzzles using anagram blocks on a piece of felt. She earned about ten thousand dollars a year—not a great deal, even for a small-scale literary heroine, which in a way she was. She was often referred to as Queen Elizabeth, and various Double-Crostic fans fussed over her; Arthur Hays Sulzberger invited her to lunch at the New York Times, and Philip Hamburger profiled her in The New Yorker.

  She told Hamburger that h’s were the bane of her existence, with f’s and w’s close behind; these letters were constantly left over and she was constantly forced to do something with them. “Powwow” was a favorite answer; “tow-row” set off a terrible fracas among her fans. Once, a reader wrote in to accuse her of an overwhelming affection for Vedic divinities. “Vedic divinities are not a spontaneous choice for definitions,” Mrs. Kingsley replied. “They are a godsend after hours of juggling. If you were constructing a puzzle and had letters left over and they made a Vedic divinity, what would you do?” Mrs. Kingsley carried a notebook with her and was constantly jotting down words that might someday come in handy. She told Philip Hamburger: “Here’s ‘wow-wow.’ A lovely thing! Four w’s. ‘Hiwi hiwi.’ What a word! Means a small marine fish in New Zealand. And ‘chiffchaff’—just an English bird. All my people need do is look up ‘chiffchaff’ under ‘willow wren.’ Ah, yes! ‘Dingdong.’ And ‘omoo,’ a romance in the South Seas. Don’t tell me people aren’t better educated for knowing these things!”

  In her later years, Mrs. Kingsley became a small-scale prima donna. According to Margaret Farrar, the grand old lady of the New York Times crossword puzzle, she talked of nothing but Double-Crostics. She dropped the names of her famous fans, who included Elmer Rice, Ogden Nash and Frank Sullivan. Helen Barrow, who designed the puzzle books for Simon and Schuster, saved several of Mrs. Kingsley’s letters; in them she complains about her harried life: she was constructing some two hundred puzzles a year, and it wasn’t getting any easier. Finally, in 1952, Queen Elizabeth retired—she died in 1957—and she was succeeded by Princess Doris.

  Doris Nash Wortman, born in New Jersey in 1890, was a Smith graduate and past president of the National Puzzlers’ League. She worshiped Mrs. Kingsley; she had been proofreading Double-Crostics for her since 1939, when she had submitted an extremely complicated construction—a valentine to her husband, Elbert—to a fans section. On the evidence, she appears to have been among the most good-natured women who ever lived. Her puzzles had a light-hearted quality Mrs. Kingsley would never have tolerated; she introduced modern writers and witty quotations and definitions. Her fans sections contained lovely tidbits about each of her correspondents; she was a gracious, chattering den mother to her troop. Her letters and book introductions are positively ebullient. “WOW! What an ad!!” she wrote Helen Barrow when the fiftieth Double-Crostic anthology was published. “Everyone thinks Series 50 utter, especially I!”

  Mrs. Wortman lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, with Elbert, a sometime advertising man, and according to her daughter, DeNyse Pinkerton, she worked all the time. “She started at five a.m. and worked until eleven p.m.,” said Mrs. Pinkerton. “It was ghastly. The worst part was my father. He had had one glorious failure after another. She really paid the rent, and he made her make him a three-course dinner every night.” Mrs. Wortman earned about fifteen thousands dollars a year.

  Doris Nash Wortman had only two problems. One was Elbert. The other was that she occasionally irritated her puzzlers by using made-up expressions in order to use up left-over letters. Once, for example, she printed a definition reading, “The corn is evidently higher than Hammerstein thought.” The answer was “giraffe’s eye.” Also, Mrs. Wortman had an unfortunate tendency to let her politics seep into her puzzles. Laura Z. Hobson, the novelist and author of Gentleman’s Agreement, was a Double-Crostic solver; one day, while having lunch with Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, she brought up the subject of Mrs. Wortman’s leanings.

  As Mrs. Hobson recalls it: “I said, ‘Say, Cuzz, doesn’t anybody edit those things?’ ‘Why, L.H., what’s wrong?’ he said. I told him that that very week there was a clue that said, ‘Describing some of the people in the South,’ and the answer was ‘blacks and tans.’ He blanched. For the Saturday Review to talk about blacks and tans! I gave him other examples. One thing she frequently did was to have the definition indicate a noun though the answer was a participle. Once, for instance, she had used ‘A gift for an institution,’ and the answer was ‘endowing’ instead of ‘endowment.’ It was just sloppy. Cuzz was appalled and asked me to edit the puzzles, and I have done it ever since. Twice I asked her to kill puzzles completely. One of the quotes was anti-labor, and the other was a John Masefield poem on the death of President Kennedy. I don’t think that’s what you expect to come across in a puzzle. In my opinion she was nowhere near as good as Mrs. Kingsley.”

  After Mrs. Wortman’s death, Elbert decided to carry on the puzzles—something even his wife had thought he was not equipped to do. He began lurking in the offices of the Saturday Review with sample puzzles. He claimed he had done all his wife’s work. He threatened to sue. “It was somewhat sticky,” says Norman Cousins. A few fans had submitted tryout puzzles; in addition, Cousins contacted his sister’s husband and asked him to take a crack at it. Laura Hobson judged the entries, voted for Middleton, and that was that.

  Mrs. Hobson thinks Tom Middleton does a bang-up job, and so does Margaret Farrar. I think he prints too many definitions that require looking up, too many arcane musical comedy references and too many quotes that are not as felicitous as he thinks. There is a glorious point in the working of a Double-Crostic when the puzzle falls together, you see what the quote is going to be about and you realize who the author is—and that moment is not so glorious when the quote is from Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual.

  I see that I am on the verge of blaming Thomas Middleton for my ineptitude at his puzzles, and I suppose that really isn’t fair. I still like Double-Crostics. I sit with my dictionary and my atlas and eventually I solve them. In pencil. Erasing a lot. Still, I long for a giraffe’s eye or two, and I remember the time Mrs. Wortman’s definition said: “This really ought to be next to a church,” and the answer was “laundry.” That was nice. I miss it.

  May, 1977

  The Sperling Breakfast

  No one in Washington quite knows how Godfrey Sperling’s breakfast group got to be quite the thing it has become. Godfrey Sperling himself, who started holding his breakfasts eleven years ago, claims to have no idea whatsoever. “I didn’t set up a group,” he said recently. “I just had a breakfast. And it wasn’t even a breakfast. It was a lunch. Chuck Percy was coming to Washington, and he didn’t know anyone, so I called up Bob Novak and Alan Otten and Peter Lisagor and three or four other reporters, and before I knew it I had twelve people. And they came. It made a lot of ripples, so I had another. And another. The second year I did it people started saying, You’ve got something this city needs. I said, I can’t imagine it. But I kept having them. Each time I’d say, This will be the last one. After a while, people started saying it was an institution. I couldn’t believe it. I c
ouldn’t believe it.”

  There have now been nearly eight hundred Sperling breakfasts, and thirty-seven members of the print press are invited to attend; over the years, they have met with almost every major American political figure. The Sperling Breakfast is indeed an institution. Some of its members think it’s a good institution, useful and convenient, and that it would have to be invented if it did not exist. Others think it’s a bad institution, dangerous and silly, and that it ought to be taken out like an old horse and shot. I’d like to tell you who said the line about the horse, but he asked not to be quoted. He doesn’t want to hurt Godfrey Sperling’s feelings. Also, he doesn’t want Godfrey Sperling to throw him out of the breakfast group.

  I recently spent a week in Washington attending five Sperling breakfasts. I had a wonderful time, except for the eggs. On Monday, Governor Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia was the guest. On Tuesday, Governor James “Big Jim” Thompson of Illinois. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal. On Thursday, White House counsel Robert Lipshutz. On Friday, Budget Director Bert Lance. I also interviewed many of the members of the breakfast group. I had a wonderful time doing that too. Everyone I spoke to was helpful. Many of them said it was only a breakfast. Sometimes it produces stories, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s not why it’s valuable, they said. It’s valuable because it provides an opportunity for the press to see how politicians perform. And why is it dangerous? I asked. It’s dangerous, they said, because it’s pack journalism and it can become a substitute for real reporting. This interested me, because it seemed to me they had it backward. The Sperling Breakfast is valuable because it’s pack journalism and it does substitute for real reporting. And it’s dangerous because it provides an opportunity for the press to see how politicians perform. How a politician performs does not prove anything about him except for his ability to hornswoggle journalists and pay his respects to their egos. But I’m getting carried away.