She Made Me Laugh
Page 5
The idea was to take the money and run—to leave Hollywood at the top of your game. But the Ephrons, like many, stayed too long. The jobs were drying up. The absurd salaries were going to others. The half-life of the screenwriter was closing in on them. Henry was philandering, and Phoebe, like her mother before her, was drowning in a maddening deafness. The clever response that meant so much to her was no longer possible if she could not hear the initiating remark. Someone had corked the round table. The sounds were muffled. The quips evaporated in midair.
* * *
In 1963, after completing the script of Captain Newman, M.D., the Ephrons sold the Linden Drive house and moved back to New York and the Broadway stage. New York is where Phoebe died in 1971 at an East Side hospital where, to the last, she begged for a drink and Henry, out of mercy, gave her an overdose of Demerol. Phoebe’s last words to Nora have become legendary, if not famous. Nora repeated them all her life, cited them, invoked them in her eulogy, and many years later her son Jacob Bernstein used them as the title of the documentary film he made about his mother. They were, it seems, her mother’s last tutorial to her daughter, showing her once again how things were done—even dying. Phoebe was physically diminished, wracked by her cirrhosis and a terminus for countless life-sustaining tubes. Nora gasped when she entered her mother’s hospital room. “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes,” Phoebe said.
In his memoir, Henry Ephron had it somewhat different. “Take notes, Nora. Take notes. Everything is copy.”
Phoebe Ephron was fifty-seven when she spoke those words. By then, she was a sour alcoholic, her wit curdled into spite and cocooned by an engulfing deafness. She was dying a very early death. She must have been angry and scared, all the usual emotions, but what we get is this sort of George S. Kaufman quip, something from the Marx Brothers, nothing to suggest a career hollowed out, a woman who had thrived in a man’s world and then, what with four children and a husband who had his own troubles with the bottle, could write no more. She lacked the flint to make the spark that would burst into a play or a screenplay.
Phoebe Ephron’s final project was a play called Howie. Significantly, it was a solo effort, Henry apparently relegated to kibitzer. Howie was about a Long Island family and the twenty-one-year-old daughter was played by Patricia Bosworth, who would go one to become a journalist and biographer. One of her books was about her father, the celebrated lawyer Bartley Crum, who, among other things, represented the so-called Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters who went to prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bosworth had much in common with Nora—not just a background in the leftist politics of the Hollywood writing community, but also parents who were alcoholics. In his latter days, Bart Crum was a pathetic drunk.
Howie tried out in Boston. The play was Phoebe’s alone, but Henry attended the rehearsals, offering unsolicited and unwelcome advice as the script went through the usual revisions. The cast was one day told to expect some more revisions, and so they assembled on the stage of the Colonial Theater. Suddenly, Phoebe came running down the aisle with Henry in pursuit until, blocked by the stage she could go no farther. Henry grabbed her from behind, whirled her around, and socked her in the jaw.
Phoebe left. She returned to the theater with her jaw wired.
Howie opened on September 17, 1958, suffered poor reviews, and closed three days later. On opening night, both the Ephrons and Bart Crum were drunk. Nora went backstage. She had a question for Bosworth: Why was she wearing falsies? Bosworth, who like Nora was hardly busty, replied that Phoebe had insisted on it. Nora was flabbergasted. Her mother didn’t even wear a bra until after her fourth child was born, she told Bosworth.
It was many years before Bosworth told Nora the story of her parents’ brawl. Nora’s reaction was nonchalant. Sounds right, she more or less said. In his later years, Henry Ephron was often violent and subject to rages. He became a feared, unpredictable presence, sometimes on the periphery of Nora’s life, sometimes commanding immediate attention. Phoebe died in 1971 and Henry in 1992. In 1978, he married June Gale, the widow of Oscar Levant, famous for his musical genius and his mental instability. Gale is not mentioned in Henry’s New York Times obituary, which, judging by her quotes, was approved by Nora.
* * *
In the telling of her daughters, Phoebe Ephron took to drink suddenly—one day not a drinker, the next day a lush. Nora, as the eldest of the four girls, got if not the best of her mother, then the best years. Phoebe was Nora before Nora could become Nora. She was a writer, which is a statement not just of occupation but of lifestyle and fervent commitment and a commensurate determination to rid herself of the ghetto, the shtetl, which was just down the hallway in her own home. Phoebe Ephron spoke Yiddish to her mother.
Kate Lotkin, was born in 1891 in Bobruisk, Belarus (then Russia). The town was a provincial capital with a sizable number of Jews. It had all the trappings of Eastern European Jewish life, a theater and numerous synagogues. In 1904 or thereabouts—the records are sometimes in conflict—Kate joined the mass exodus of Jews from the Russian Empire to America. She apparently traveled by herself, following her brother, Louis, who had emigrated two years earlier. For whatever reason, Kate did not live with him but boarded with a family on Manhattan’s East 103rd Street. The 1910 census had her working at a factory—probably a sweatshop. That same year she married Louis Wolkind, who had arrived from Russia in 1899. Phoebe was born four years later.
There would be three Wolkind children—Harold, the eldest; Phoebe; and then Richard, born when Kate was around thirty-five. Dickie, as he became known, was fourteen years younger than Phoebe and, in effect, became her ward. It was apparently Henry and Phoebe who paid for his college education. He became an artist, and when the entire family followed Henry and Phoebe to California, he went to work for Disney.
For Kate Wolkind, her son’s death was the first of several tragedies in a life that was both fortunate and accursed. She had avoided the Holocaust and the mass murder of the Jews of Bobruisk. She had worked and married her way out of the sweatshops and the tenements of East Harlem. She married a businessman, had three children, and died in sunny California. It was, on the face of it, a good life.
But her husband had cheated on her—maybe frequently. A son had died young and a daughter at fifty-seven. Her husband had repeatedly gone broke, and he wound up living a faux retirement in Los Angles, existing not on his savings, as he pretended, but on the Ephron dole. Kate herself had preceded her daughter into deafness—“Bacon and eggs, as usual,” Nora’s sister Delia wrote her grandmother replied when she asked, “How are you?” To her daughter, she was an object lesson in a housecoat: This is how not to conduct your life.
Phoebe Ephron would never be a housewife. It was not only that domesticity bored her but also that she was a woman who didn’t just want to be a writer, she was a writer. And additionally, she had witnessed her mother’s faithfulness to her unfaithful husband, and if it was not a lesson to her, then it was to her daughter Nora. The imperative to control her environment—to, in effect, direct—had to stem at least in part from the way her father and her grandfather treated their wives. If one was making an old-fashioned movie of Nora’s life, one would isolate the day Henry Ephron insisted on driving Nora to her new elementary school. He got lost.
To see these patterns repeated generation after generation—the strong woman, the wayward husband—suggests the futility of therapy or behavior modification and a surrender to the power of genes. Nora would no doubt argue with that, and I, finding the thought merely interesting, would indifferently move on. But the indomitability of Kate and Phoebe, their resoluteness and concern for others, surely wended their way into Nora’s character.
Nora was, really, the kindest of persons. She could be stern and withering and all of that, but if you needed someone at your side in the hospital, if you needed companionship, if your child needed a surrogate mother or an internship or, really, anything at all, Nora was the o
ne to turn to. She not only was the occasional godmother but she was the patient ear for the children of her friends who had come to a parenting dead end. She remembered birthdays; she celebrated weddings. Talk to my kids, her friends would plead. She was a vast mother to a brood of kids who had their own parents but looked to her as somehow wiser, maybe because their parents did as well.
In 1989, Nora’s college roommate, Marcia Burick, lost her son, Ken. He had been a student at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and in a fit of depression he went to a local gun shop, bought a weapon—and killed himself. Nora, who had been in England at the time, hopped a plane for the funeral, and a few years later was the inaugural speaker at the Ken Goldstein Memorial Lecture. Afterward, Marcia insisted that the two of them drive to the gun shop where Ken had bought his weapon. Marcia wanted to confront the storekeeper. Nora would not permit it.
“She said, ‘You just go across the street and wait for me.’ ” Nora entered the shop and came out some minutes later.
“I said to her, ‘What did you say?’ She said, ‘We’re not to talk about it.’ ”
Years earlier, Nora had shown Burick just how cheeky she could be. Not long after leaving Wellesley, the two women were rooming in New York when Nora took a call for Marcia. The caller was Clayton Fritchey, the press aide for Adlai Stevenson, who was John F. Kennedy’s ambassador at the United Nations. Marcia had applied there for a job and was at that moment wandering the streets of New York, unemployed, broke, and down in the dumps. Fritchey was reporting that Marcia was still under consideration for a spot in the press office.
“I came back at Friday at five o’clock or something, and Nora said, ‘I didn’t know where to find you, you have the job at the U.S. Mission.’
“And I said, ‘How did that happen?’ She said, ‘Mr. Fritchey called and said tell Marcia to come in next week, we want to have another interview with her.’ And Nora said, ‘Well, she can’t possibly come in next week, Mr. Fritchey. She’s been offered a very high-level job at the Ford Foundation and she has to let them know on Monday. So you need to tell me now that she does or doesn’t have the job.’
“And he said, ‘All right, tell her she’s got the job and to be here at eight thirty Monday morning.’ ”
* * *
Did Nora confront the storekeeper? Did Nora really bluff out Clayton Fritchey? Hard to say, but my guess is yes. In the first place, she was no liar. And in the second place, both these stories are consonant with everything I ever saw of Nora. She was not physically brave, not some sort of reckless skier or mad spelunker, but she had no trouble confronting people. She once told off the Secret Service when some agents were clearing a space for the vice president’s limousine. Nora and I were in a cab, which was waved away by the Secret Service as we were on our way to some event. Deferring, as usual, to authority, I told the cabdriver to move on, but Nora leaped out to give the Secret Service agents a piece of her mind. Unimpressed, they sternly ordered her back into the cab and on her way.
Far more dangerously, she one night effectively challenged about a dozen Neapolitan waiters to a fight. We had arrived late in Naples and dashed to a famous pizzeria located on the picturesque but ominous waterfront. We got to the place just as it was emptying and, to the fury of the waiters, simply took a table. A reluctant waiter arrived and we ordered a special pizza, a Neapolitan favorite. He returned with the sorriest pizza any of us had ever seen—payback for keeping the place open. Nora took one bite, rose, and faced the waiters who were lined up against the far wall. There were about a dozen of them, a sinister lot, some of them I histrionically recall picking their teeth with stilettos.
“Napoli!” Nora cried out.
The waiters snapped to attention.
Nora inserted her right hand into the crook of her elbow—the universally known gesture for Fuck you!
I gulped. What, was she out of her mind?
The waiters didn’t stir. None of them made a move. We were alone in the restaurant, surely about to die, I thought.
Nora gave the waiters a triumphant look. She sat down, pleased. We dutifully nibbled at our awful pizza and somehow got back to our hotel, a grandiloquent dump with played-out air conditioning. Nora never said a word about it. I never forgot it.
Line Up Naked
* * *
Mahatma Gandhi, the revered founder of the Indian state, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, were lovers. This stunning, unsupported, and hugely ridiculous item of gossip was imparted to the touchingly innocent women of the Wellesley entering class of 1958 by the incoming freshman from California, Nora Ephron. She had come from Hollywood, and she knew things that no one else did; and when she conveyed them they were not couched as rumor or speculation—never preceded by the modifier “I have heard”—but imparted as truisms. Not to believe them was a sure sign of denseness, of naïveté, of not knowing how the world, the real world, worked. Nora Ephron, recently from Beverly Hills, knew how the world worked.
Nora was not the only person from Beverly Hills in that class. There was at least one other, and her name—at least the name Nora gave her in an essay for McCall’s magazine—was Bonnie. Bonnie Sloan, as it turned out, although “Sloan” was some Anglicized version of an Eastern European name. Bonnie’s father was not in the movie business but in the paper cup business, and her mother did not write or, for that matter, do anything much at all. Nora reported that her mom’s days were devoted to playing canasta or gin rummy.
Nora and Bonnie were best friends, and at the age of thirteen they decided they would both go to Wellesley. But by the time she arrived on campus, Bonnie had had a nose job, which she had attributed to an auto accident, had collected a huge amount of “Chanel suits and Dior dresses,” some twenty jars of face creams, a copy of the New York Social Register, and a smattering of an English accent which she had acquired the previous summer on a trip to Europe. By then, Bonnie was in the process of becoming a gentile, which for her was a matter of wardrobe and speech inflection and possibly an indifference to food, and so she arrived at Wellesley that late summer of 1958 in a Chanel, while Nora, by her own description, wore “a plain little red plaid dress and red hat.” It is not however how she is remembered.
She is instead recalled as breezing in as a bold Californian—no pleated skirts for her. She wore Capri slacks and a Hawaiian shirt and she soon planted her flag: an eleven-by-fourteen framed black-and-white photo of her mother “draped in furs and getting out of her car going to a premiere in Hollywood,” recalled her close college friend, Jennifer Carden. “It was just so exotic.”
The fur, as it happened, was symbolically important. It was a mink that Phoebe had bought around 1954 from a Beverly Hills furrier who had run into a spot of trouble with the IRS. “It was an enormous mink,” Nora wrote in a 1975 essay called “The Mink Coat,” but what set it off was not its size or its color but its astounding provenance: It was not a gift.
Minks flowed by the acre off the women of Beverly Hills. But they were gifts from their husbands. Phoebe’s mink was nothing of the kind. It came not from Henry but from the partnership of Phoebe and Henry. Phoebe was “defiant” about that—about not being like other mothers, “the other mothers who played canasta all day and went to P.T.A. meetings and wore perfume and talked of hemlines . . .” Phoebe was different.
For that era, Phoebe Ephron was exotic. She did not merely work—odd enough for the time—but she had a genuine career. Her letters to Nora at Wellesley were not handwritten on some sort of girlie stationery, fibrous and parchment-like to the touch, but were typed. This announced a backstory, possibly a job—and not the usual Wellesley route of school, pinned, engaged, married, and then life as a homemaker Junior Leaguer. Phoebe’s letters were businesslike, briskly written, and tart. To at least some of the Wellesley girls, her letters came not just from Hollywood but from the future—from a place women would someday go.
Nora would read the letters out loud to her college friends. Who had a mother lik
e this? Whose mother could write like that? In fact, who had a mother who worked, who earned money, who eschewed housework and domesticity, the way Phoebe Ephron did? When Phoebe was asked what a particular woman did, she would dismissively say, “her nails.”
Henry Ephron used the phone. He would call Nora at Wellesley, frequent and lengthy phone calls in an era when a long distance call was a great luxury, reserved for whispered family tragedies. He would pour out his heart to her. As far as her parents were concerned, Nora had gone straight from high school to adulthood. In a family of careening emotions, the eldest daughter became wife and mother.
The troubles of the Ephron family were not evident to the women of Wellesley. Instead, they saw in Phoebe nothing but glamor. One recalled spotting her at the intermission of a play she and Henry had written. It was called Take Her, She’s Mine, and it was based on the lives of two teenage girls, a lightly disguised Nora and Delia. It opened on Broadway at the end of 1961 and had previewed in New Haven earlier that year. Nora and some friends came down to Connecticut from Wellesley for the show. Not only was it a signal event for the young women—how many of them had seen a Broadway-bound production?—but there, in an alley at intermission, was Phoebe, catching a moment alone. She was smoking a cigarette and wearing that voluminous mink coat—confirmation of all that her letters had intimated.
Predictably, Nora became a college journalist. She had been on her high school newspaper, and so it was just a matter of time until her name would appear on the masthead of the Wellesley College News. It was, however, a snoozy time on America’s college campuses. The storm of student disruptions was not even on the horizon.