She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  She blogged for the Huffington Post at a time in her life when she hardly needed the exposure—but her friend, Arianna Huffington, needed her. A deal was struck. Nora got stock when HuffPost was sold to AOL. That was a nice piece of change, to be sure, but it only made Nora richer, not rich. Surely, her decision to blog was prescient—Huffington Post was on its way to becoming a mighty media empire—and it was just another example of Nora knowing when to get off one platform and go to another. (She also helped create HuffPost’s “Divorce” blog.) She was extending her brand and she was, for the most part, doing it well.

  In some respects, she was merely laying off her bets. For all her fame as a movie director, she remained a writer—a screenwriter, a playwright, an essayist, a feature writer, a newspaper reporter, and a blogger. It was all about writing. It was what she could do, what she could always do. So even when the movies turned sour and directing seemed iffy, she could still write. She could sit down at the keyboard and simply write. No pitch meetings and constant efforts to get things within budget, no worrying about some temperamental actor. Writers didn’t have to fret about what the studio was thinking or that the poor box office for some totally unrelated film was going to affect their own prospects. They could just sit down, alone, and write what they wanted. The purity of the exercise is enthralling, cleansing, and makes one wonder, as the sentence comes to an end, “Where did that come from?” How lucky. How lovely.

  So she could always be what she always had been. Other directors, when the time came for them to be pronounced too old or dried up, might wait for the project that never comes, the light that never turns green, projects in perpetual development, a ring of hell that never occurred to Dante. Not Nora. She was a writer and writers write. So she always did.

  And yet, in retrospect, a hint of desperation is suggested. After all, Nora was blogging and doing other kinds of “light” writing while, in essence, dying. Her time was running out. The disease that would kill her had been identified in 2005, and its course, she was told, was immutable. She would die, one of her several doctors had told her, and nothing she could do would change matters. The prognostication was harsh and delivered in a callous manner—as if the doctor was going to show this celebrity just how little she mattered. The disease, after all, did not give a damn. Neither, it seemed, did the doctor.

  A bit after that, Nora and Nick came over for dinner. I was then living with Mona Ackerman, a clinical psychologist who would later be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. (She died five months after Nora did.) Solemnly, Nora told us the news, and told us also not to tell anyone. She had already made up her mind. Her last act was not going to be about dying, but about living. She was not going to let the disease take over her life, make her uninsurable as a movie director, and turn her into an object of pity. She was not going to spend the last years of her life as a dying person. She would spend them as writer. That night, Nora mentioned that she and Nick might go to Seattle for a stem cell transplant. We instantly made plans to accompany them—take a hotel room, rent an apartment, something. Mona was simply not going to let Nora out of her sight.

  Nora did not go to Seattle for the transplant. She was sixty-five—a bit old for the procedure—and, besides, as the entire New York literary community knew, Susan Sontag, the public intellectual, had tried a transplant and it had failed miserably and caused her great suffering. Sontag had died in 2004. One of her doctors had been Stephen D. Nimer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Until he relocated to Miami, he was one of Nora’s doctors as well.

  The other option was maintenance—prednisone and then later Vidaza, a tolerable chemo, and a slow, barely obvious decline. Nora chose the latter, and with the exception of a brief period when prednisone engorged her face, her condition was not noticeable. She made monthly visits to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on New York’s Upper East Side for her infusions, often running into the Beverly Hills émigré and breast cancer patient Joyce Ashley there. At Nora’s request, Joyce never said a word to anyone—not even her closest friend, Barbara Walters.

  After her infusions, Nora would sometimes walk across York Avenue to New York Hospital, where she would visit Mona, whose own cancer was inexorably advancing and whose chemotherapy was causing periodic hospitalizations. Nora would sit on the couch in Mona’s room, invariably 242 on the fourteenth floor. Nora would usually bring a gift. They would talk, and I, just to do something, would amble down the hall.

  The period is a blur to me, and checking my calendar hardly helps. It is pitted with appointments with doctors and radiation centers—the busy, exhausting schedule of the cancer sufferer. Both Nora and Mona were dying, not in the sense that we all are, but with an approaching imminence. Mona, however, was demonstrably weaker, thinner, and more and more fatigued. I had gone with her to a salon above Columbus Circle where her head was shaved and she was fitted for wigs. We bought odd berets also, and all sorts of goofy caps. Shortly before Nora died, she resorted to chemotherapy even though she had little faith it would work. I went with Nick to the Columbus Circle salon. He bought some caps.

  For a time, Nora’s numbers, the numbers we all get to know—the reds and the whites and the platelets—teasingly jumped around, up and down, and then, defeated, they leveled off the wrong way. She was moved from the leukemia ward on the seventh floor to the bright, sunlit room Mona had always occupied. She died there, June 26, 2012.

  Just Like the Movies

  * * *

  This is the way it began:

  I had come to the Washington Post on June 17, 1968, and was assigned a desk right in front of Carl Bernstein. He was a District kid, born in Washington and raised mostly in the Maryland suburbs, but he had this New York air about him. We hit it off. It was the Vietnam War era, and Carl, as an alternative to the draft, was heading off to the army, about to do his six months of active duty as a member of the D.C. National Guard. I had already done my stint in the New York National Guard, and so I wrote him a memo on what to expect in basic training and how to game the system. For instance, I told him that rubbing a lead pencil over the rust spots on a rifle will make it look like it had been thoroughly cleaned. Carl was impressed and we became friends, best friends actually.

  Carl was married to another Post reporter, Carol Honsa. I was married to Barbara Stubbs, whom I had met at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and who had become an editor at the Washington Star, then still an important afternoon newspaper. We two couples spent a lot of time together.

  The Bernstein-Honsa marriage did not last, although the Bernstein-Cohen friendship did. So I was ringside, so to speak, as Carl went from being just another reporter at the Washington Post to being a monster celebrity who, with Bob Woodward, was credited with bringing down the Nixon administration. I went along for the ride. By day, I was parked in Annapolis covering the Maryland State House. At night, I was a friend of Woodward’s and Bernstein’s.

  This was 1973. The burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s offices had taken place in June of 1972. Within a year, Washington was transformed. The burgeoning scandal—so big it would bring down the president and produce the indictment or jailing of an astounding forty-three government officials—had made Washington into something it had never been: a capital city in the European mode. It was no longer just the seat of government, but a magnet for writers, filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, and itinerant intellectuals from all over the world. They descended on Washington and sooner or later ambled up to the vast newsroom of the Washington Post. Always, they sought out Woodward and Bernstein or the paper’s editor, the astonishingly cinematic Benjamin C. Bradlee. I was there, attached to Carl and Bob like a barnacle on a ship.

  One night at a Washington restaurant I had dinner with the founder and editor of New York magazine, Clay Felker, and one of his associate editors, the former Washington Post reporter Aaron Latham. Felker wanted to start a new magazine and Latham wanted me to write for it. It would be called Couples, and it would cover
the new and varied ways men and women—it was only men and women at the time—coupled. Because my wife worked for the competing newspaper, I got assigned to do a story about spouses or partners who competed with each other. One of those couples was the Greenburgs—Dan Greenburg, a famous humorist, and his younger wife, Nora Ephron.

  Dan was a hugely successful writer. In 1964, he had published How to Be a Jewish Mother, which became a number-one best seller. The book, his magazine articles, and even some plays gave him the kind of fame and income few writers achieve. In 1967 he was among the literary and intellectual elite invited to the Playboy Magazine Writers Conference. It was a stellar collection of writers and intellectuals and those who were both. Normal Mailer was there. Gore Vidal was there. Gay Talese was there, and so was Arthur Schlesinger and Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut and Calvin Trillin—so many literary celebrities that the magazine got precisely the kind of publicity it sought and Hugh Heffner, its founder and owner, was transformed from a Peeping Tom into a patron of the arts—a regular Maxwell Perkins. Nora was there as well, but she is not mentioned in any of the newspaper stories or present in the group photos. She was—maybe for the last time in her life—a mere spouse.

  By 1973, Dan and Nora were beginning to switch places. Nora was obscure no more. In fact, in certain circles—literary and journalist Manhattan—she was famous or fast becoming so. By then, her writing for the New York Post had attracted attention. She had transformed a Post series on the late-night TV host Johnny Carson into a paperback book, and she was writing extensively, and brilliantly, for a gaggle of magazines before she settled down and made Esquire pretty much her home. Early on, she had developed what writers call “a voice”—a characteristic and appealing idiosyncratic style—and while she later wrote about how she had developed it over time, it was in fact discernible in her childhood letters home from Camp Tocaloma in Flagstaff, Arizona. She was a rebuke to writer’s schools everywhere. She had clearly learned to write in the womb. But beyond what was an amazing literary output—she compiled her freelance pieces into a collection titled Wallflower at the Orgy—Nora had become a personage. She was a slight woman—a foodie but a dinnertime nibbler—but she could throw enormous weight. Something about her attracted the more famous, the equally famous, and the about-to-be famous. She was endowed with heroic chutzpah, a voice that somehow cut through cocktail party clutter, although there was nothing brassy about it.

  Nora had what the army calls a command presence. It was somehow picked up by, among others, passing waiters or, it seemed, even cabdrivers who were blocks away. She had immense self-confidence, a ready wit, a capacious hard drive of a mind, and absolute certainty. Some people feared her, a few people hated her, but nobody ignored her. At home, she was setting a table that had not been equaled since the fabled one at the Algonquin Hotel. Hers, too, was round.

  Clay and Aaron had wanted Nora, not necessarily Dan, to write a piece for New York magazine, but they offered the assignment to them both. Dan accepted. Nora did not. Felker demurred. New York magazine was no longer interested, but Felker and Latham were interested in what effect their rejection had on the couple. What did it mean that Nora had titled her 1970 collection Wallflower at the Orgy and that Dan had followed two years later with a Playboy article “My First Orgy”? “I was playing with the idea of the piece,” Latham said later.

  Whatever the idea of the piece was, it didn’t quite work out. Clay and Aaron gave me a list of couples where the woman not only competed with the man but in some cases eclipsed him. I was to interview the increasingly famous Barbara Walters, whose husband at the time was Lee Guber, a prominent but hardly famous theatrical producer. Also on my list were Barbara Howar, a Southern writer and Washington celebrity, and her lover, Willie Morris, the immensely respected former editor of Harper’s magazine. I think I had Helen and David Brown. He was both a theatrical and film producer, but she had become the editor of Cosmopolitan and had filled its pages with sex and sex and then, just to make sure, more sex.

  I was to do other couples as well. One was the combo of Sally Quinn, who had zoomed to spectacular prominence as a writer for the Washington Post’s new Style section, and her boyfriend, Warren Hoge, then the city editor of the New York Post and on his way to a distinguished career at the New York Times. But most of all there were the Greenburgs, Nora and Dan. Their marriage was supposedly in trouble.

  I called Nora.

  “Oh, Richard, we all wondered who Clay was going to get to do this piece,” she said.

  “Well . . .”

  “You’re too good for this.”

  “Really? You don’t even know who I am.”

  “Yes, I do. And you are too good for this. I mean, I could see cooperating if I was promoting a book, but I’m not. So, why would I do this? Why would I talk about my private life if I’m not getting anything out of it?”

  These all seemed like good questions to me. I have put them down as I remember them, but what I clearly remember—no memory fog here—is how precise she seemed, how strong and just so logical. There was nothing evasive about her, nothing about being pressed for time or some other lame excuse. She just didn’t want to do it. It made no sense to her. That made plenty of sense to me. I told her so, and we planned to meet about a month later in Washington, when the new journalism magazine More was holding a convention and where Rolling Stone magazine, even hotter than More, was giving a party. We would meet at the party.

  The Rolling Stone event was held on the mezzanine level of the Mayflower Hotel. It was a boisterous and packed gathering of heroes. Journalism—particularly print journalism—was suddenly triumphant. It was not all that long before that Spiro Agnew, the former Maryland governor and about to be former vice president of the United States (he would plead “no contest” to corruption charges on October 10, 1973), was inveighing against what would later be called the establishment press. He called the members of that press “nattering nabobs of negatism”—a phrase concocted by the White House speech writer William Safire, destined before long to become a nabob himself as an op-ed columnist for the vigorously negative New York Times.

  Agnew was the point man for an administration that made the press into an enemy. The Nixon people characterized it as elitist and liberal, not sharing the values of ordinary and altogether admirable Americans. Indeed, the Nixon White House was onto something. The press had grown in wealth and importance. The Washington Post, not even the most important newspaper in Washington a mere decade earlier, was now vying with the New York Times in setting the national news agenda. The television networks were of supreme importance, and what were once regional newspapers—the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, and others—were now circulating in Washington and being read carefully. They all tilted left—antiwar and anti-Nixon.

  Reporters were becoming famous. They were becoming nationally known, not merely influential in Washington or some state capital, but cheered as tribunes of the people. None were more famous than Woodward and Bernstein, and no newspaper was more acclaimed than the Washington Post. It was ousting a president. It had pried a manhole cover off a sewer of presidential abuse—burglaries, wiretaps, the pilfering of personal records, the use of the Internal Revenue Service to punish or harass political enemies—and then a cover-up of all these crimes through the use of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Here, at last, was a story to stop the presses. Here, finally, was the hoary cliché realized—the story to blow the roof off city hall, or the Capitol in this case. In due course (1976), the movie All the President’s Men was made about Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, but as good as it was—and it was very good, indeed—it seemed oddly redundant. The whole thing had seemed like a movie all along.

  In a New York magazine piece, Nora honored the great story. “I have been in Washington, off and on, for only the last eight months, but there was no way to be there, in whatever journalistic capacity, and not know it was the best story one had eve
r covered.”

  Richard Nixon had just resigned. August 9, 1974 was an emotionally stormy night—rainy and warm, as well—and Carl and I drove around for a while and finally settled on a small party somewhere in the safely liberal Adams Morgan section of Washington. I remember little about it, except that it was dull and non-jubilant, precisely what Carl was seeking. It was important for him not to be seen gloating. He did not gloat.

  In her piece, Nora did not gloat either. But she was covering the press, and she knew that for the press there could never be better days. She rued the end of the story, the loss of the Dostoevskyian Nixon as well as his astonishing collection of henchmen, and the plunge into the tepid constancy of the genially conservative Gerald Ford.

  The Watergate scandal had seemed a conspiracy buff’s concoction, a tale for naïfs. Experienced Washington hands were certain they knew better. Richard Nixon had been on his way to a landslide victory over Senator George McGovern. (Nixon won an astounding forty-nine states.) Why risk it all on what his own press secretary had called a “third-rate burglary”? And why burglarize the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and not, more logically, McGovern’s campaign headquarters, which was much more likely to house secret plans, incriminating or embarrassing memos . . . something!

  Nixon had been around forever, entering Congress in 1946, winning a Senate seat in 1950, and becoming Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president in 1953. He had run for president himself in 1960, losing by a hair’s breadth to John F. Kennedy and then losing a California gubernatorial race two years later. He had been a congressman, senator, vice president, and high-powered New York lawyer. He was the most experienced of experienced politicians, and Watergate was dumb—and therefore unlikely.