She Made Me Laugh
Page 6
Still, being on the newspaper was both fun and exhilarating. Lynn Sherr, also at Wellesley and bound for a great career as a print and television journalist and the author of several books, recalled the sense of excitement and importance that every journalist experiences—at least at first—but hardly ever acknowledges. That feeling of being special that comes with review tickets to local plays, with review copies of books from publishers, with being the first in so many ways—but mostly from writing something that everybody reads. The paper sets an agenda that is widely discussed, debated, or merely noted. For the journalist, this is thrilling—or, sometimes, frightening—but the feel of it is mighty like the one described by entertainers when they first hear the narcotic of applause: Me? Yes, you.
But with the thrill comes accountability. This Nora faced head-on when, in her junior year, she and Jennifer Carden reviewed a novel by May Sarton, a Wellesley faculty member. Sarton was not one of those college teachers who tosses off the occasional book infected with footnotes. She was an important novelist who would later, daringly, reveal herself as a lesbian and become a feminist icon.
Sarton was not yet out of the closet when she published The Small Room, but it contained hints aplenty—same-sex relationships between college teacher and student, teacher and teacher, and so on. (It is set at a school much like Wellesley.) One of these relationships the Wellesley reviewers—Nora and Jennifer—called “abnormal.” Maybe that’s what set Sarton off.
For both reviewers Sarton’s sexuality was not the issue at all. Their gripe was with her condescending treatment of both students and student government. This was too much for both Nora and Jennifer, who concluded that The Small Room was too small in its outlook. They panned it. Sarton, furious, ordered them to appear in her office.
As it happened, Nora at the time was in Massachusetts General Hospital, in nearby Boston, having a pilonidal cyst removed. The cyst is located at the base of the spinal column, making sitting painful. So for the showdown with the imperious, intimidating, and indignant Sarton, Carden went alone.
The prospect of facing Sarton without Nora at her side terrified Carden. But as she was approaching Sarton’s campus office, a taxi pulled up and Nora popped out. She was holding a rubber ring that served as a cushion. They went to face the formidable Sarton together.
For the next thirty minutes, Sarton upbraided them as nonentities who wrote for a student newspaper that no one read anyway. A terrified Carden said little. But a resolute Nora, gripping her rubber cushion, stood her ground. They were journalists, she said. They had offered an opinion—and that was what they were supposed to do. Nora offered no apologies. She was right and that’s was all there was to it. Nora was Nora even before she became Nora.
* * *
When the writer L. P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” he might have had in mind college life in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was not a place where young people merely dressed somewhat differently or listened to a different kind of music. It was a place of stifling convention and conformity. The rules were rigid, in loco parentis regulations of all sorts, so bizarre in our rearview mirror they seem not just quaint but insane. College was in some senses merely kindergarten for big kids.
As if to show just how conformist college life of the early 1960s could be, the young women of Wellesley were asked to join students across the county to be photographed in the nude. This shockingly dopey program lasted from the late 1940s through the 1970s. It was developed to examine the rate and severity of several diseases. One of the diseases was rickets, usually caused by malnutrition and not likely to be found in Wellesley students or the students of other elite institutions. Nevertheless, without a murmur of protest, thousands of students over the years lined up naked to have their pictures taken. Such was the docility of the times. Such, in a snapshot, or many, was the 1950s and early 1960s. In those days, students did what they were told.
That culture—compliant and conformist—would crash in a frenzy of demonstrations and protests in the later 1960s. But at the moment, all was quiet. Vietnam was still called Indochina, and France was fighting to retain it as a colony. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was at Boston University earning his doctorate in theology; Jews were still being excluded from prestigious law firms; and women were expected to marry, have a brief career, and then stay home with their two or more children, one boy and one girl if at all possible.
It is tempting to see the Nora of Wellesley as always ahead of her time, which in a sense she was. She was aiming for a career. She also had her eye on a marriage and a family, but like her mother before her she saw no reason why she could not have it all—after all, men did. She wanted a career, but she also wanted to get married—and at the time she almost did. She described her intended as “a humorless young man,” who doubtless saw no humor in that description. He was finishing up at Harvard Law School and moving to New York, and she was going to transfer to Barnard College in New York to be with him.
Nora went to see the class dean about arranging the transfer and was given a bit of advice that she wrote about later: “You have worked hard at Wellesley. When you marry, take a year off. Devote yourself to your husband and your marriage.”
* * *
Roy Furman was at the Shubert Theater in New Haven the night of the mink. He was Nora’s boyfriend at the time, a Harvard Law School student who went on to establish a hugely successful investment firm, become an important New York–based philanthropist, vice chairman of Lincoln Center, and—most pertinently—a Broadway producer. In fact, he became a lead producer of Nora’s final work, the play Lucky Guy, but never conferred with her about it—maybe because he wondered if Nora would object to his participation. Their college romance had not ended well.
Furman was a typical Nora boyfriend. As a Wellesley student, her social life revolved around the elite New England schools. From Harvard Law School alone, she dated Mortimer Zuckerman, the real estate magnate who at one time or another owned the Atlantic magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the New York Daily News, and Stephen G. Breyer, an eventual Supreme Court justice. Years later, Nora and Zuckerman resumed a relationship. It was brief and deteriorated into a lasting friendship.
Furman’s recollection of that night at the Shubert varies from those of others who were there. He remembers a glamorous Phoebe Ephron all right, but he also remembers her as being drunk. He recalls both Henry and Phoebe as being witty and garrulous company, but he was more than awed by them. He was intimidated. He found them loud and overbearing, throwing off cultural references the way a wet dog shakes off water. He was a kid from Brooklyn, a graduate of the proletariat Brooklyn College, a self-described provincial, and here were these people, the slightly tipsy Ephrons, Outer Borough Jews once themselves, who had somehow managed to vault the rivers (East, Hudson) to command Beverly Hills and Manhattan. They were not New York Jews at all. They were not wedded to a neighborhood or tribe but to wit, repartee. They were always sitting down to dinner.
As for their oldest daughter, Nora was already what she would become. She was as voluble as them, as witty, as well-read, as exuberant. Furman’s friends were charmed by her and sought her company. Furman, while dazzled and in awe, was not in love. Nora was extraordinary, and Furman knew he was not likely to meet someone like her again. She was rare—a star shooting by. Should he catch her?
His answer was no. If he wanted a wife—and that prospect hung over their yearlong relationship—then it would have to be a woman who cooked, who made his breakfast, raised his children, and did little else. Nora could cook and raise children, but she wanted to do more—plenty more. Her prefix of choice for wife was working, not house. That much was clear and all Wellesley knew it. Nora was going to New York. Nora was going to write.
Furman backed out of the relationship. Later, when he became a financier, they sometimes met—at this or that cocktail party, at this or that event, in Manhattan, in the Hamptons. The encounters were
cordial, not warm. At home, discussion of Nora’s latest book or essay or pronouncement was not tolerated by Furman’s then wife. The past lingered. It threatened.
Roy Furman runs a billion-dollar investment fund. He has been a passive or active producer of more than fifty Broadway plays. He’s been vice chairman of Lincoln Center and a past chairman of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He is an active alumnus of both Brooklyn College and Harvard Law School and was finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Roy Furman is a man of immense accomplishment, power, and prestige. Yet one reason—an important reason—he ended his relationship with Nora Ephron is that when she was twenty-one and he twenty-two, she overwhelmed him with her Hollywood background as well as her personality, brains, and ambition. He felt mismatched.
“I was scared,” he said.
* * *
Furman was hardly alone. The word “scared” or “scary” is a leitmotif when classmates of Nora’s are asked to recall their time with Nora back in her Wellesley days. Sometimes the word is offered as a synonym for awe or respect—as in she always seemed to know more than anyone else and was always absolutely certain about what she knew.
“She was scary in that she always knew she was right. You didn’t want to cross her,” said Lynn Sherr.
All Wellesley knew Nora would have a career and a marriage—but simultaneously or, if not, in what order probably even she did not know. She not only told everyone she would be a writer, she was quite specific about where she would write. It would be for the New Yorker. (She and Jennifer even papered their dorm room with New Yorker covers.) For once, Nora was wrong—or premature. Eventually, she would write for the New Yorker. First, though, she’d clip newspapers for Newsweek.
The Mail Girl Delivers
* * *
On graduation day 1962, Nora got into a rented car and drove to New York. She had already leased an apartment at 110 Sullivan Street, down in the coffeehouse, folk-scene part of Greenwich Village, and she had already been to an employment agency where she said she wanted to be a writer. She was sent to Newsweek.
At $55 a week, Nora would be a “mail girl.” That was the title, the job description, and the limitation. Women, she was quickly told, did not write at Newsweek—although in actual fact, one of them did, but Liz Peer was in the faraway Paris bureau, where she could be overlooked as much as possible.
Right off the bat, Nora got a lucky break. She was made the personal mail girl of the magazine’s editor, Osborn Elliott, and became what was known as an “Elliott girl.” She sat right outside the big man’s office and watched as he transformed Newsweek from a traditional news magazine—more or less a wrap-up of that week’s events—to a journal that didn’t wait for the news to happen but set out to make some itself. By the end of the decade, Newsweek had pitched itself into the civil rights struggle, devoting three covers written by Peter Goldman to the movement, and had also come out against the Vietnam War.
Newsweek was about to become what Madison Avenue called a hot book. Just a year before Nora’s arrival, the magazine had been bought by the Washington Post Company. The deal was the work of Philip L. Graham, an extremely bright but extremely troubled Floridian who had married Katharine Meyer, whose father, Eugene, in 1933 had bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction. Graham was an energetic and ambitious owner, and Newsweek soon became an energetic and ambitious reflection of himself. It was a fun place to work.
Newsweek was on the make, attempting to catch up to the older and more established—not to mention politically conservative—Time magazine. It never succeeded—not in circulation or ad revenue, but attention was a different matter entirely. In 1957, the magazine had hired the adventurous Ben Bradlee as its Washington bureau chief. Bradlee, who later became the editor of the Washington Post, had helped arrange Newsweek’s sale to Graham. In 1961, his Georgetown neighbor and friend, John F. Kennedy, had become president. The magazine was very well situated.
Being an Elliott girl had its advantages—proximity to power, and therefore to office skinny, most of all. In the days before email there was just mail, and it had to be delivered and picked up at each desk or department. The mail girl got to circulate, to get an overview, to meet everyone, and, no small matter, to make an impression. Someone who was as smart and personable as Nora was bound to be liked and, in due course, consulted: What was going on? Is this a story? What do young people think? And, much more important, what was going on within the bureau? Who was sleeping with whom? Who was drinking too much? Who was being transferred to London and who in London was coming home? Has so-and-so been fired and is so-and-so pregnant? Mail girls knew so much.
This particular mail girl was more than well informed. She was already well connected. She had already dated Victor Navasky, soon becoming the first degree of separation for so many New York writers. While at Yale Law School in 1960, the polymorphic Navasky had founded a satirical magazine called Monocle, which he promised to publish more or less regularly. (He called it a leisurely monthly.) After law school, he went out to Michigan to work for the progressive governor, G. Mennen Williams, and then returned to New York, bringing Monocle with him. He soon collected a coterie of young writers, Nora among them. They met weekly for drinks, in totally self-aware homage, at the storied Algonquin Hotel. Calvin “Bud” Trillin, already a Time magazine writer, called it the “square table.”
Through Navasky and his soon-to-be wife, Anne, Nora connected with other writers. It would be natural to label her a networker or a social climber, but as much as she sought out interesting people, so interesting people sought out her.
From the telling, it seems that she did not so much move from Wellesley to New York as simply take her proper place in the city. She was the child of screenwriters and playwrights. She knew her way around the Algonquin dining room because her parents stayed in the hotel when they were in New York. She effortlessly dropped names, and it was impossible to tell—at least I never could—if the relationship was close or merely passing. She could excite a gathering with a single question—at a stiff Scarsdale dinner party, she shocked Anne Navasky by asking the women at the table if they had vaginal or clitoral orgasms. She was young and something more than attractive; she was magical. She not only made things happen, but things happened to her. She trailed buzz like a cartoon character does fairy dust.
Through the Navaskys she met young literary New York. She became a fixture at Elaine’s, the saloony restaurant established by Elaine Kaufman in 1963, which soon became a writers’ hangout. The Navaskys introduced Nora to her first husband, Dan Greenburg, an already established writer, and through him she met her eventual best friend, Judy Corman.
Victor Navasky connected her with Lynn Nesbit, who would ultimately become her agent. And Lynn would later hire Amanda Urban. Binky, as she was better known, became Nora’s lifelong literary agent and her very close friend.
Nora dated Tom Wolfe. She dated Ward Just. She dated Charles Portis. They were all newspapermen making the long turn into magazine work or novels. Wolfe and Portis were at the New York Herald Tribune; Just had been at Newsweek before following Ben Bradlee to the Washington Post. They were all big names at the time—and, with the exception of Just, would go on to phenomenal success as novelists. (Just’s success was more d’estime than commercial.) Nora dated Esquire and Playboy editors. She dated her Newsweek colleagues. She dated a lot. Mastheads spilled from her lips.
It was a phenomenal period. Sex had not only awakened from its 1950s dormancy but become a political statement. Blacks were being liberated. The Vietnam War was being protested. Students were duking it out with the faculty. Drugs were everywhere. Abortion was demanded as a civil right. Turmoil, turmoil, turmoil.
The Pill, the contraceptive, had been approved by the government in 1960, and although it was legally unavailable to single women in some places, Manhattan was hardly one of those places. Now women, too, were being liberated. They were not just demanding equal rights and being called by their ow
n names—not the “Mrs.” before their husband’s—but they were having sex and were only slightly more likely to get pregnant than men.
Nora was hardly an exception. By her own testimony, she had an abortion—although she might have said that as a political statement, an affirmation of sisterhood, rather than because it was an actual fact. At first, she went to Planned Parenthood for the Pill, and then only if she was in a relationship. Later, it became a matter of routine. She used drugs—marijuana, of course, but also cocaine on occasion. She had the best of all alibies: She was young. It was the sixties.
* * *
For a kid just out of college, Newsweek in the 1960s was a feast. Like many journalistic enterprises it had a very high estimation of its own importance. Yet it was true that if not the whole world then key parts of it—New York, Washington, and some European capitals—read it avidly and wondered along with more than about two million readers what would be on its cover.
After a slow start, Newsweek became the chronicler of the 1960s. The magazine’s cover stories from that era were the usual stuff of politics and war, but there, too, was a naked Jane Fonda (shot from the back) who had starred in the movie Barbarella, and more substantial and consequential subjects such as “The Negro in America” and separate issues on “Marijuana” and “LSD.” For the marijuana cover, the magazine allowed its reporter to buy dope—and use it.
But before Newsweek plunged into the chaotic 1960s, it held fast to the 1950s. Its covers were mostly a march of political or government figures—New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, House of Representatives speaker John McCormack, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, and a stark profile of John Fitzgerald Kennedy dated December 2, 1963, a bit more than a week after he was assassinated in Dallas. That was followed a week later by one of Lyndon Johnson.