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She Made Me Laugh

Page 4

by Richard Cohen


  The naïveté of Nixon’s goons was fortunately matched by the naïveté of the Post’s Watergate duo. They didn’t know enough to know better—or so it seemed. The more experienced reporters at the Washington Post tried to get Woodward and Bernstein taken off the story. They were called “the kids.” They were inexperienced. They believed what their sources—What sources, anyway?—were telling them. They would embarrass the newspaper.

  But Carl came to see the story. He saw it in the same way an artist sees beauty in the prosaic. He had come from a left-wing family that knew Nixon in an almost tactile way. Nixon had been on the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee. He had waged one of the dirtiest campaigns in American political history, the California Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he had smeared as a “pinko,” a fellow traveler, a naïve lefty in the thrall of the Soviet Union. He had called her “the Pink Lady,” pink “right down to her underwear,” he added in a smutty aside.

  Carl sensed Nixon looming over Watergate. This ability to see over the horizon—which for newspapers is just the next day—was itself seen by Alan Pakula, the director of All the President’s Men. He was shooting in Washington, and he and I were walking to lunch when he said, “Carl always knew Nixon was behind Watergate.” It was a moment of clarity, the sort of thing a film director, like a diamond cutter, extracts from his material. Who is this character? Who is this complex person who has to be explicated in less than a hundred minutes? Pakula had nailed Carl—and Carl had nailed Nixon.

  * * *

  I could not get into the Rolling Stone party where I was to meet Nora. It was a boisterous, stuffed affair that spilled out of the hotel meeting room. There was a guest list and I was not important enough to be on it. Woodward was, and he insisted that I be admitted. I entered and I heard someone say something about Nora Ephron. She was pointed out to me, talking to a celebrated investigative journalist. (I think it was James Ridgeway of the Village Voice, but he has no memory of this incident.) Her back was toward me. I saw a slight woman; dark hair. I approached and possibly interrupted. I offered my name. The guy from the phone call. I extended my hand.

  Nora whirled on me. How dare I write what I had written? I was staggered. My piece had been rewritten by Latham. He had added stuff about Nora and Dan. Nora came out with a book called Wallflower at the Orgy and then Dan went to one. “Nora wrote a piece for Esquire in which she lamented a life without discernible breasts,” I supposedly wrote, and Dan “mentioned with approval that some of his orgy mates were well stacked.”

  Trouble was, I had written none of that. Aaron had. He had shown me a page proof of my article, but what did I know? I was covering the Washington suburbs. He was in the midst of literary New York. He had the authority that comes from getting a table at Elaine’s, the celebrity hangout. I had not protested.

  I tried to defend myself, but Nora started quoting from my piece, word for word. Every word. I was under attack, and it was as if she were landing blow after blow. What impressed me most was the recitation of my putative words seemingly flying out of a typewriter and glancing off my forehead. Ping. Ping. This was one smart lady. She characterized my piece as slime and turned to the immensely important journalist who may or may not have been Jim Ridgeway for agreement. I hoped he would disagree, but I was new to Nora and did not yet know that nobody did that. “Right?” she asked.

  “Right,” he said.

  I walked away.

  At Christmastime, Carl called from New York. My wife Barbara had gone to see her parents in Ohio. I was working on a book about Spiro T. Agnew and had stayed behind in Washington. Carl had something to tell me. He was in love. He sounded giddy.

  And who is this wonderful woman?

  Nora Ephron, he said.

  “Good-bye, old buddy,” I said. “This is the end of our friendship.”

  Nonsense, he said. They were coming to Washington.

  The next day, there was a knock on my door. I opened it. It was Carl, and around him, from the back, came Nora.

  “Richard, this will be just like the movies,” she said. “We started off hating each other and we’ll wind up loving each other.”

  And we did.

  Beverly Hills Writers

  * * *

  Before they moved to Hollywood, Henry and Phoebe Ephron were New York writers, successful playwrights. They went out to the coast for the money and the lifestyle—Nora had home movies of her parents playing tennis in the ridiculous California winter—but not because the conversation was better there or writers more cherished. They arrived credentialed by Broadway. They stayed, temporarily, for twenty-two years, clinging to the lush L.A. life and the studio dole like the houses that threaten to slide off the hills in the rain.

  In Hollywood, writers are furniture, rarely cherished, easy to replace, and after a while, sagging. New York writers are a different matter entirely. They matter, or they did. They met at the Algonquin, the Lambs, or the Players. They gathered on the East End of Long Island, the storied and eventually gilded Hamptons, where they drank at Bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton and breakfasted at the Candy Kitchen in the same town. There and in Manhattan, writers were not overshadowed by actors’ fame and wealth. They were central to the town. They could get good tables at celebrated restaurants, and they were cherished by hostesses for their presumed wit, their expected erudition, and, too often, their amusing inebriation.

  In New York, writers were not rewritten by hack producers and ordered to cut a chapter or two to entice a vaguely literate audience. Playwrights were sacrosanct, their words untouchable by producer and director and certainly by performer. Time, custom, and—most important—the Guild said so. This was in contrast to the screenwriter. The term “Hollywood writer” carried the freight of compromise, of selling out, of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, of William Faulkner gone to rust and F. Scott Fitzgerald gone to drink.

  Henry Ephron was an extroverted guy, personable, smart—and probably, like most screenwriters, terrified of the blank page. Husband and wife worked together, but there is the hint in Henry’s memoir that Phoebe Ephron was “the closer”—the one who knew how to bring the screenplay home, the one who knew how to fix the problem in the second act, who spied the problem that derailed the script. Henry would pace and dictate, with Phoebe lying on the couch, taking it all down. Phoebe would later type up the notes, not in the least a stenographer’s chore. The typist gets the last word.

  For a time, Hollywood was good to the Ephrons. They earned $750 a week for starters and $3,000 a week when their contract was renewed. They could afford a maid and a cook. They were writers, making a wonderful living at it, which was not only wonderful but rare. Their friends were mostly New York expats, like themselves.

  The dust jacket of Henry Ephron’s memoir, We Thought We Could Do Anything, is a kind of a Walk of Fame on glossy paper. The names of more than sixty movie stars twinkle from the inside back cover—most of them drive-bys who appeared in one of the Ephrons’ pictures. But while the Ephrons were never in the very first rank of Hollywood screenwriters, they did know movie stars and studio heads. They worked at Fox, a major studio with major stars—Cary Grant, for instance, who sat one row ahead of a sixteen-year-old Nora and her mother at a 1957 Fox screening of An Affair to Remember. Years later, Nora would incorporate that movie into her Sleepless in Seattle—an homage from one picture to another but also to her childhood.

  Henry Ephron’s book is largely a romp, a version of one of the movies where someone says, “I know, let’s put on a play.” People then go off and write and become successful on the stage. In that sort of movie, these writers know Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld, Jr., and George S. Kaufman and then, on the Super Chief, they go out to Hollywood, bumping into movie stars in the narrow, swaying, corridors of the sleeping car.

  It was, in fact, just this way. The Ephrons did know George S. Kaufman, and in 1944 they indeed took the Super Chief to L.A. By then, they had two kids—Nora and Delia—and had discov
ered that Phoebe was not cut out for the domestic life. After a while, she got that cook, that housekeeper, and a nice Beverly Hills house on Linden Drive, the lesser flats for sure, but Beverly Hills nonetheless. With its Spanish courtyard (later torn down) it was the perfect stage set for a perfect life that eventually turned into a perfect horror. The Ephrons became drinkers, matrimonial brawlers with horrendous fights erupting in the middle of the night, sending the younger kids scurrying downstairs into the arms of Evelyn Hall, the housekeeper. They would get into bed with her.

  If this were a movie, some studio exec would point a finger to the end of his nose to indicate a predictable cliché. The life of the Ephrons was indeed that—well-paid screenwriters gone to drink. In real life, though, the kids were scared and always on edge. Phoebe would tank up nightly, a bottle of Dewar’s an evening, and Henry would match her. They once went to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and recognized themselves in the brawling George and Martha. They were shocked and vowed to mend their ways. They soon reverted.

  For Nora, this was a painful childhood and adolescence. She recounted it in her writing. “My mother became an alcoholic when I was fifteen,” she wrote in I Remember Nothing. “It was odd. One day she wasn’t an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush.” Equally odd, if you will, is Nora’s flat recitation of what happened. She admits to being terrorized by her mother’s late-night banshee behavior, but the record contains very little else. She simply does not dwell on it. Her parents were alcoholics. It was a fact.

  It was a fact, too, that over the years Nora mentioned her disruptive and disturbing childhood but seemed undisturbed and hardly disrupted by it. She wrote about her anxiety when her parents came to visit her at college—would they wake the dorm with their shouting?—but it was all material, a combination of the awkward and the absurd. I never heard a confession of pain. A tear never appeared in her eye. She recounted stories of her father’s wild behavior—how in a single day he had agreed to buy four houses north of New York for a family compound—but this event was described with a combination of reluctant amusement and smoldering anger, not the stuff of tragedy.

  She was fifteen when her parents took to the bottle, maybe past the age of childhood trauma, but the confusion of the time, its hurt and raw empathy for her teetering mother and father, are missing. By then, she had put emotional distance between herself and her father, and talked about him in an antiseptically flat way, although sometimes with rising anger: He did this. He did that. It is too easy to repeat the words of her mother when Nora saw her in the hospital, dying: “It’s all copy.” But it seemed that way. She rarely wept. Her friends wondered about that, but then they considered her fearless, too. Not so. Among her fears, I think, was crying. She was afraid to cry.

  One story stands out. It is the one she wrote about the famous New Yorker writer Lillian Ross, who came to her parents’ house for a party. Ross was a last-minute addition, brought along by St. Clair McKelway, a former newspaper reporter who had joined the New Yorker staff, where he became a mainstay. Ross was young and already dangerous. She had done the famous takedown of Ernest Hemingway in which he blathered silliness and she recorded it in tight notes. Ross asked to see the house. Phoebe took her around, and they came upon pictures of the Ephron children—Nora and her three sisters.

  “Are those your children?” Ross asked.

  Yes.

  “Do you ever see them?” Ross asked by way of rebuke.

  Phoebe responded with the bum’s rush. She asked Ross to leave.

  The story became Ephron family legend. It was about their mother, the chic hostess in the Galanos dress, erupting into the indignant momma, furious that she could be asked whether she could be both a writer and a mother. It makes for a good story, but Phoebe’s was an odd reaction. A humorous or self-deprecating rejoinder was in order, or maybe flat-out honesty: Yes, I know what you mean. I have two full-time jobs. Something like that.

  Anyway, Nora herself doubted the story. It wasn’t until years later, when she had moved to New York, that she again saw Ross. They met at a party given by Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live. The two women shook hands, meeting like fighters touching gloves before the first bell, asking each other innocuously barbed questions, Nora all the time circling and circling so she could get in the punch about her mother: Had it actually happened?

  “I went to your house once,” Ross finally said.

  “Really?”

  “I didn’t see much of you, though.”

  The story is called “The Legend” and it is a very nice piece of work. It ends with Nora now convinced that her mother had indeed given Ross the ol’ heave-ho. Ross’s confirmation redeemed Phoebe in Nora’s eyes. The drunk of her later years reverted to the steely-eyed writer-housewife-mother she had once been, a capacious woman who, much like Nora, could do so much and do it simultaneously,

  “I got her back; I got back the mother I’d idolized before it had all gone to hell,” Nora wrote.

  But Ross had confirmed nothing, only that she had been to the home. Hers was a one-shoe recitation of the fact. The other never drops—nothing about the getting the boot, no fist-slapping ending, and the story’s emotional content is disproportionate to the facts. Nora wanted so much to redeem her mother, to restore her to the remarkable woman she had once been, that she took this reed and tried to weave a basket from it. In this sense, it fails as a story, but not as an expression of yearning for what was lost. The pain, it seems, endured.

  * * *

  Back in New York, Henry Ephron had worked for George S. Kaufman as his stage manager. Along with his frequent partner Moss Hart, Kaufman was responsible for one hit after another. He was a sought after play doctor as well, but his importance to this tale is that he was a celebrated wit who personified Hollywood’s idea of New York theater. Kaufman was an acerbic man, formidably talented, who had been born in Pittsburgh and had a convert’s zeal for New York. He also had a seat at the Round Table.

  The Algonquin Hotel was—and is—located on West 44th Street in the Theater District. The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune were then located nearby, as was the New Yorker magazine and various publishing houses. The place had the three virtues real estate people cherish—location, location, location—and so it was there that in 1919 a Broadway press agent named John Peter Toohey gave a lunch for Alexander Woollcott, the drama critic of the Times. Such a good time was had by all, that the next day they had another lunch—and then another and another. In 1929, it all ended. The famous Round Table was no more.

  In the intervening years, the Round Table became celebrated. Two of the attendees were newspaper columnists—Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun—and they were probably neither loath to nor ethically proscribed from mentioning their friends in their columns, almost certainly improving their witticisms. Kaufman was no slouch as a humorist, but the one who is best remembered for both the Round Table and her wit is the lone woman writer among them: Dorothy Parker. She is widely considered Nora’s antecedent. Early on, Nora considered her to be a role model.

  The similarities are obvious. They were both women—indeed, Parker was the only female at the Table who was not there as a wife. She was a theater critic, an essayist, an accomplished short story writer, an occasional radio performer, and for a time, a highly successful screenwriter. Her trademark was lacerating, acerbic wit—one-liners that have zinged through the ages.

  As Parker got older, she became increasingly involved in left-wing politics. Nora, too, was left of center, and she might have moved even harder left had she lived in Parker’s era—the Depression, the Holocaust, and the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Parker wound up being blacklisted, and for a while she could not work in Hollywood. Nora’s politics were never that intense, and unlike the boozing, disconsolate Parker, she had a sunny personal life. Early on, though, Nora wanted only to be Dorothy Parker. She once wrote that she was raised on Parker’s lines—and, of course, by a mother who more resem
bled Parker than her daughter did, the drinking above all. That, though, came later.

  “All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker,” Nora wrote.

  The connection between the table at the Ephrons’ Linden Drive home and the round one at the storied Algonquin were both aspirational and real. New York, the Algonquin, and the Broadway stage were the Jerusalem to which this staunchly secular household would someday return. In the meantime, the Round Table was re-created at dinner. The Ephrons were writers. Moreover, they wrote dialogue. They got paid for wit, for sparkling words, for a way with a story. Their kids not only grew up in a talkie environment, but were expected to do some of the talking. They discussed world affairs and politics. They worshiped FDR and his New Deal, thought Adlai Stevenson should have triumphed over Dwight Eisenhower, and knew the names of obscure nineteenth-century feminists such as Lucy Stone, nowhere near as famous as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Nora’s characteristic way of talking, a manner that swiftly commanded the table, was surely developed at these dinners. Her lingua franca was theatrical, the language and speech patterns of the stage. Sentences were packed with meaning, and when they ended, it was not because she was out of breath, but because a point had been made (a little applause, please). If Henry and Phoebe Ephron hit all the marks in a wonderful career, it nevertheless meant writing not for oneself or for people like oneself, but for studio bosses who wanted to make money—movies, not cinema. The Ephrons were what Jack Warner had in mind when he supposedly exclaimed, “Writers! Schmucks with Underwoods!” Julius Epstein, an Ephron family friend and cowriter of one of Hollywood’s most revered pictures, put it this way: “There wasn’t one moment of reality in Casablanca. We weren’t making art. We were making a living.”

 

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