She Made Me Laugh
Page 2
If so, I had Nora wrong. “I have never believed that there was anything simple about abortion,” Nora wrote. She went on to castigate the women’s movement for making it seem otherwise—for insisting that abortion has “nothing to do with anything but a woman’s need to control her own body.”
“Baby” is a long essay of sparking brilliance. It is a kind of Magna Carta of common sense—not only Nora’s reprimand to me but also her rejection of trendy feminist dogma, her realization, for instance, that the patronizing authority of the male physician was simply being replaced by the patronizing authority of zealous natural childbirth advocates and their belief that pain and purity were synonymous. One tyranny had been replaced by another and each time the patient, the woman, was being told what to do and not necessarily for her own sake.
* * *
There was then and always an air about Nora of great wisdom—not merely, if I may correct myself, of great wisdom, but of greater wisdom. She was smart, very smart, and knowledgeable, very knowledgeable, but beyond that she had an inerrant touch for the best of almost anything. She herself was a tastemaker and she did not recommend anything lightly, casually, as if it did not matter. She not only knew what she liked, she knew why she liked it.
Her mentor in matters culinary and such was Lee Bailey, who ran a boutique out of Bendel’s on Fifth Avenue and a salon out of his country place in Bridgehampton. Bailey was a renaissance man of style, a champion of simplicity (no hors d’oeuvres), who showed Nora both how to set the table and how to wear her hair. It was undoubtedly he who led her to Bridge Kitchenware, a very upscale housewares store on East 52nd Street. The place was founded by Fred Bridge and had a distinct French flavor. It became a favorite of Craig Claiborne, the longtime restaurant critic for the New York Times and an unparalleled foodie. Bridge was where the cognoscenti bought their knives, pans, and, as it turned out, food processors. It is where I bought mine.
The Cuisinart food processor became ubiquitous in the mid-1970s. If the device had one subtle but fatal drawback it was that it was invented by an American and sold by an American company. That, apparently, would not do, and Nora insisted that my wife and I buy a French device from Bridge. So one day in New York, I trudged over there and bought the French food processor. I remember dropping Nora’s name, and being warmly greeted—a celebrity by extension.
I was enormously proud of my French food processor, so clearly different and superior to the pedestrian and common Cuisinart that I overlooked its galling shortcomings. After all, it had an unimpeachable and daunting provenance—the Bridge Co., Nora, Lee Bailey, and by extension Craig Claiborne and most of France. It was, in fact, an inferior product—not much good at slicing, as I recall—but it was retained not so much for what it did but what it said. Then one day I noticed that in Nora’s own kitchen, the klutzy Gallic device was gone. It had been replaced by the utterly common Cuisinart. I got one myself.
Nora’s domain was the kitchen, and she ruled it not just with superior knowledge but with an assurance that simply brooked no questions. At about the time of the Cuisinart silliness, our kitchen in Washington was in dire need of modernization. As luck would have it, Nora had recommended our house for the shooting of Heartburn. In exchange for the inconvenience of turning our home into a movie set, we were to get a brand-new kitchen. Into that kitchen would go, besides the fancy French non-slicing food processor, a huge refrigerator-freezer, a Garland restaurant-style stove the size of a modest Bessemer converter, and—quite dear to my heart—a sprayer for the sink. It was, as far I was concerned, the handiest thing to have in the kitchen.
One night I rattled off the things I’d like the studio to provide. At the mention of the sprayer, Nora frowned. “Why would anyone want a sink sprayer?” she demanded. The question was asked with such contempt that I immediately realized that I had failed to see the utter worthlessness of the thing. I considered that it might be dangerous as well.
In the end, Paramount found that my house did not look like it belonged in Washington. The kitchen remained untouched, but Nora’s condemnation of the sink sprayer stayed with me. What did she see that I could not? Indeed, what could she see that so many others could not? When I was in other people’s homes, I would sneak into the kitchen and closely examine the sink sprayer. What? What?
Several years later, Nora upgraded her own kitchen. Voilà, a sink sprayer! What had happened? I asked. How come she had changed her mind? She looked at me as if I had gone batty. She had never condemned the eminently utilitarian sink sprayer, she said. Why would she? It was a marvelous device, good for, among other things, spraying. But . . . , I started, but she gave me that look, that you are a fool but my friend anyway look. One of us was crazy. But one of us had a sink sprayer and the other didn’t. And as Nora would say, so there.
* * *
Nora had many audiences. She was a female director. But she was also a female newspaper writer and a female magazine writer and a female magazine editor and a female book writer and screenwriter and blogger and a mother and a wife three times over. She had had all these roles, and in retrospect, she timed them perfectly, working for Newsweek when it was at its rambunctious best, and then moving on to the New York Post when tabloids were the appropriate vehicle for covering a seemingly deranged city, and then magazines like Esquire and New York when they were both explosively innovative, and then movies in one capacity or another and the stage, where her parents had begun and where they, too, ended.
She seemed always to be in the right place at the right time, and so her story is also the story of those times and those publications and art forms—their importance and their whoopee fun. Like some peripatetic foreign correspondent, she covered her share of revolutions—the sexual one, the feminist one, the Watergate one (it toppled a president), and the post-Watergate one in which journalism emerged with all its smug righteousness—so important, so very important.
In all her roles she would pause and take stock of what was happening. She hovered above herself, a crane shot in which Nora Ephron could observe Nora Ephron and get the necessary distance to see the humor in her pathos. She wrote about being a girl and then a college student and then a single woman on the make for a career and on the make for men as well. None of these essays were confessions and none of them asked for sympathy. They were reports by a reporter observing herself as material—copy. She was not merely amusing about others. She was amusing about herself.
Nora chronicled what it was like to be a woman in almost every stage of life, including aging. She was direct about it; she didn’t like it one bit, not what it did to her neck, her memory, her energy, and even her sex drive. She wrote with a precise and disarming honesty, with a between-us-girls kind of touch. Women found a soul mate, a companion, while for men her stuff was an immense voyeuristic opportunity: Oh, so that’s what they think!
Yet she did not write about dying. She did not write about her disease or mention that she had always had a claustrophobic fear of cancer. It seemed to her that it was omnipresent, always lurking, and that the disease that had killed her mother’s beloved younger brother, Dickie, at the age of only twenty-eight, was somehow stalking her. Once or twice when she had some procedure done—removal of her thyroid, for instance—I could hear the dread in her voice and would dismiss it with a joke, not appreciating her fear. Yet when it came, she kept it mostly to herself.
She inadvertently dropped hints. There were signs. She and her husband, Nicholas Pileggi, were regulars on the yacht owned by David Geffen, the entertainment mogul. The boat was a 423-foot behemoth. It lacked nothing—not a gym, not salons, not staterooms with drop-down TV screens imbedded in the ceiling—and yet Nora once said she had to get off and see a doctor, and the reason she gave was dehydration. This on a yacht where an outstretched arm would immediately be met by a crew member bearing a bottle of Fiji water. The other guests were puzzled, but they did not catch on.
Neither did The Harpies. This was a luncheon group of women who met irre
gularly in New York. The name was given to them by Liz Smith, the gossip columnist (an original member of Lee Bailey’s set) and a charter member. (The group was formed by Jeanne McCarthy and included Barbara Walters, Lisa Caputo, Peggy Siegal, Cynthia McFadden, Maurie Perl, Beth Kseniak, and Jennifer Maguire Isham—some of the most powerful women in the communications business.) Nora called the last meeting for May 8, 2012, and designated, for its truffles, La Petite Maison as the meeting place. By then, she was only weeks away from going into the hospital. “I’m going under the radar,” she told the group. Everyone thought it was a work project, probably a movie.
Kate Capshaw almost caught on. Along with her husband, Steven Spielberg, she had grown close to Nora and relied on her for advice, for wisdom, for validation, but, frustratingly, not for hugs. (Nora was not a hugger.) Nora had lost weight, she noticed. Nora was looking wan. The change in Nora’s appearance kept Capshaw up at night, and Nora had told her that if you can’t sleep, if something is keeping you up at night, you have to face it, stare it down.
So she called Nora. “I said I am really sorry to bother you, but I am sleepless and you always said that if you’re pacing at night, you have to take care of it.” And Kate got emotional. “It’s me talking and I am just very worried about you and I’m sorry and I’m scared that I’m going to lose you and you’re sick and I want to be wherever you need me to be.
“And she said. ‘Why would you think that? I’ve gained eight pounds.’
“Then I was stuck, and I thought, Oh, shit. I know you and I know you like to look good and . . .”
“I gained eight pounds.”
Conversation over.
* * *
With the notable exception of her sickness, Nora wrote about everything. She not only chronicled her life, she consumed all the best material, leaving nothing but cinders for a biographer to sift through. Several times in the course of writing this book, I would be told some fascinating fact, some charming anecdote, something compelling or dramatic about Nora, and this fact—this whatever it was—would be imparted with appropriate solemnity or drama by whomever I was interviewing: This is something you don’t know. Later, though, I would come across it, mentioned nonchalantly by Nora herself in some tossed-off essay or blog. I came to think that Nora’s major secret was that she had no secrets.
But, of course, she did. She was less secure than she seemed, more vulnerable, less confident in her abilities than she should have been. She wrote fast, but not effortlessly, and pretty much all the time. She was thinking, thinking, always thinking, always on the hunt for material, gorging on books and somehow reading them before anyone else did. She got the review copies and the bound galleys and the manuscripts and sometimes, because other writers sought her out for advice, the outline.
She read the old stuff, too. She urged me to read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a classic from 1868, and when I was working on a script about Lyndon Johnson, she exhumed The Gay Place, Billy Lee Brammer’s unfortunately named 1961 novel about Texas politics that has nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality. The book is actually something of a secret, adored by aficionados of politics but unknown to almost everyone else. Nora knew it. She recommended I read it.
Nora was a gifted user of other people’s time. She had assistants, most important and for a very long time, J.J. Sacha, a Georgian redeemed by a Brooklyn-born father-in-law. He was a show business veteran by the time he came to Nora in 1998, having worked for both Rosie O’Donnell and David Letterman. Rosie was a demanding boss—not to mention a friend of Nora’s—but J.J. was nonetheless unprepared for his interview. It took place in the storied Brill Building, the actual Tin Pan Alley, where Nora was editing You’ve Got Mail. J.J. waited in a conference room. Nora swept in and announced, “You do not want this job. I am a horrible person to work for. I’m demanding and impatient and I will make your life miserable.”
J.J. gave her a long beat.
“I’m very serious,” Nora said.
“Sounds like just the kind of thing I’m looking for,” J.J. said.
“I’m really not kidding,” Nora said.
J.J. said he wasn’t either.
At first, Nora was as good as her word. It was not that she set out to make J.J.’s life miserable, it was rather that she was preceded by a reputation as a severe taskmaster, whose assistants had the half-life of an infantryman in some hopeless World War I battle. J.J. feared he would make a mistake, get something wrong—“forget to call a car for her or screw up a telephone message or return with Asiago cheese when she wanted Grana Padano,” as he himself put it. “I took out a subscription to the New Yorker just so I could catch some of her references. I was certain I was going to be fired for the first eighteen months I worked for her.” But he lasted until her death, by which time he had become indispensable both to her and to Nick. If Nora’s life ticked like a clock, J.J. was the one who wound it.
Nora delegated her research to him—as well as the usual assistant chores such as paying bills; booking flights, restaurants, and the theater; and maintaining the shared Nick and Nora calendar. (On occasion, he even shopped for her, backing up the housekeeper, Linda Diaz.) J.J. was also an astute reader of scripts, both Nora’s and others, and was, in some senses, a collaborator.
Later, J.J. was among the very few to know of Nora’s illness. He had seen her computer and noticed she was visiting WebMD, a website for medical information. J.J. and another of Nora’s assistants, Mary Pat Walsh, called Nora’s condition “the blood thing.”
As was bound to be the case, Nora noticed that J.J. was noticing, and sometime in the beginning of 2007, she sat him down and said, “I know you know that I’ve got something going on. I don’t want anyone to know about it, so we’re not going to tell anyone about it.” The conversation took about five minutes. After that, she almost never discussed her condition. She had cancer. She would write movies and plays and blogs and stuff—and she had cancer. It was like that. Movies, plays, cancer, and stuff. Everything in its place.
Nora’s productivity was a matter of amazement to people who were themselves amazingly productive. Meryl Streep, who seems to make half a dozen movies a year and appear at countless events in support of one worthy cause or another, marveled at what Nora was able to accomplish. Streep had basic questions: Who did the shopping? (Linda Diaz.) Did Nora sleep late? (Not often.) She must be an extremely well-organized person. (Nora did not think so.) What, then, was the secret? The answer is disheartening: brilliance.
Nora was a non-dawdler. She went at her work with dispatch. For a time, she and Nick rented a house in East Hampton where the kitchen was located directly under the master bedroom. Nick was an early riser, and so sitting in the kitchen, sipping his tea and reading the newspaper, he would hear the alarm go off above his head and Nora’s feet hit the floor and soon the pitter-patter of those feet making their way across the hallway to her study. Almost instantly, he would hear her typing—the click-clack of something worthwhile coming.
But it did not always—or maybe even usually—come quickly. As an essayist, she was an inveterate reviser, attacking the subject repeatedly, sometimes rearing back and rushing at the first paragraph all over again, trying to gain momentum for the rest of the piece. She was a former newspaper writer, and she had the journalist’s reverence for the lede—the all-important first paragraph—which either captured the reader or did not. She learned early how to do it. When the subways flooded, her story for the New York Post did not begin with a recitation of facts—not the standard who-what-where-when and sometimes why—but with Nora looking down and wondering, “Why am I standing in water?” Her lede answered no questions. Instead, it asked one—and the answer to that was the rest of the story. The average reader had no idea that a mold had been broken. Nora’s fellow journalists recognized that it had.
In her 1986 essay on how she revised her ledes—“Revision and Life: Take It from the Top Again”—she provides some insight into how hard it is to make writing seem eas
y. For a fifteen-hundred-word Esquire piece, “I often used 300 or 400 pieces of typing paper,” which is remarkable in two ways. It shows how hard she worked and it also showed how organized she was. In the pre-computer age, it was not possible to easily cut and paste. The job had to be done by cutting the copy with a scissors or sharp ruler and then pasting it where it should go. Newspaper editors—the copy desk—did it routinely, but that was for a five-hundred-word newspaper story, its format rigorously prescribed by tradition—the all-encompassing lede and then paragraph by paragraph in diminishing importance. The last paragraph could always be cut. Often, it was.
To revise the way Nora did it—to revise and revise and revise and to insert facts where they should be—was a monumental task of organization. (It was often beyond me.) By her own admission, Nora was late moving to the computer. I think she needed it less than ordinary mortals.
In the same essay, Nora allowed that because she paid so much attention to her lede, “the beginnings of my essays are considerably better written than the ends, although I like to think no one ever notices this but me.” Alas, it is occasionally very noticeable, and I liken some of Nora’s essays to Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture with its majestic Gaudeamus igitur processional which ends abruptly, as if Brahms suddenly had to bolt to the bathroom.
* * *
It may be surprising to some that Nora paid so much attention to rewriting, but it was equally surprising to her friends that she continued to write at all—not just the occasional op-ed columns for the New York Times or, of course, the lucrative movie script but blogs for the Huffington Post or the odd essay, like the one she did in 2011 for Newsweek on a television series based on the old Playboy clubs. As she got older and downright famous, she hardly needed to write at all—not for money, not for fame—and many writers, after a certain age, approach the keyboard a bit as a vampire nearing the cross. Nora, though, never stopped. She wrote furiously and continually.