With the exception of Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of newly independent Kenya, all the covers were of white men—or of themes such as “The Mighty U.S. Consumer.” There was nary a hint of the looming cultural unrest that would mark and mar the 1960s, and indeed the magazine itself featured a last-page column by Raymond Moley, a onetime New Dealer who had turned hard right. In the March 4, 1963, issue, he praised J. Edgar Hoover’s stewardship of the FBI in language so effusive Hoover himself might have scoffed: “As long as Hoover or the Hoover tradition is on guard, Americans need not fear the perils of a police state.”
Even as the sixties took hold, though, there was one tradition that Newsweek would not break: A woman’s place was in the mail room. Or the library. Or on the research desk. But not as a correspondent, writer, or editor. When, in 1970, the women of Newsweek filed a sex discrimination lawsuit, Elliott owned up not only to the truth but to the provenance of the practice: “The fact that most researchers at Newsweek are women and that virtually all writers are men stems from a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years,” he said in a statement. In other words, don’t blame Newsweek. Time magazine had been doing it even longer.
Nora was long gone from Newsweek by then, but she was so upset by Elliott’s statement that she wrote to Katharine Graham, who had succeeded her late husband as the CEO of the Washington Post Company. Nora wanted to know if Graham was aware of the situation. It turns out, she wasn’t.
According to Lynn Povich, a former Newsweek writer and the author of “The Good Girls Revolt,” an account of the sex discrimination lawsuit, Nora wrote something like “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but this is the situation. . . .” Graham, who was slowly and somewhat tardily coming to terms with the women’s movement—she wound up being personally tutored by Gloria Steinem—sent Nora a courteous non-reply reply by return mail. She found Nora’s letter to be very interesting, she wrote, and invited her stop by to discuss it. The two later became friendly, and possibly the Newsweek situation was discussed, but by then such overt sex discrimination was in the past.
* * *
Back in Nora’s day, the bright young women the magazine hired from the very best colleges were there to deliver mail, clip stories from newspapers for the library, known as “the morgue,” and work as researchers, which meant fact-checking and doing original reporting. They had one other function. They comprised an ever-refreshed sexual buffet—gentlemen, help yourselves. It wasn’t just that men—married or single—had affairs with the always-younger mail girls and researchers, it was that they sometimes even had sex in the office. In fact, one room—ostensibly an infirmary—was definitely not for the infirm.
Newsweek, like Time, kept an odd schedule. It started the workweek on Tuesday and ended it on Saturday night—often very late indeed. Nora was a researcher for the Nation section, where, on Tuesday morning, the editors met to discuss the week’s likely news. (Obviously, this could change daily and almost always did.) The most senior editors were called the Wallendas, after the Flying Wallendas, a circus high-wire act that defied both gravity and death but cheated by doing it sober. Newsweek’s editors, in contrast, pulled off their weekly high-wire act with an occasional snort.
Within three months, Nora was promoted to “clipper,” meaning she ripped out articles from the newspaper for filing in the library, and a short while later she was made a researcher. Ordinarily, that was as far as a woman could go, but before Nora in fact went, she left behind the kind of work that is remembered to this day. The magazine had scheduled a cover story on McGeorge Bundy, who was President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs. Nora was dispatched to Yale, where Bundy had been an undergraduate, to see what she could find. The result “was not just good, it was magical,” recalled Peter Goldman. (Alas, the file has been lost.)
The bulk of the story concerned Bundy’s Washington responsibilities, which, according to Newsweek, he discharged with breathtaking aplomb. (The piece itself is a virtual parody of the sort of star-struck journalism that Kennedy engendered—“In the Kennedy inner circle, Bundy shares a place with a handful of advisers, all of whom—like the man they advise—are tough, brainy and energetic.”) In news magazine fashion, the article was mostly reported by one person in Washington and written by another in New York. Almost all of what Nora contributed was, as she and everyone else expected, not used. It was, though, noticed.
“Word got around the shop that the kid had done something amazing,” Goldman continued. “Pretty soon, ditto copies of her file were being passed from cubicle to cubicle, like samizdats in the late Soviet Union. Jaws dropped. Eyes popped. It was Nora’s first big hit in the pro game, and nobody in the world beyond the walls of 444 Madison [Newsweek’s headquarters] got to see it.” In fact, by the time the Bundy cover came out, March 4, 1963, Nora had moved downtown.
Get Your Ass Out of My Chair
* * *
“I’m Nora Ephron and what should I do?”
“Well, first you can get your ass out of my chair.”
Thus began Nora’s first day at the venerated but down-at-the-heels New York Post. She had come into the city room and casually taken the seat of the city editor, Edward Kosner.
In his telling, Kosner remembers that Nora got her job because her parents knew the paper’s owner, Dorothy Schiff. In her biography of Schiff, The Lady Upstairs, Marilyn Nissenson says that actually the Ephrons knew Schiff’s daughter who lived in Los Angeles, but she gives more credence to the story Nora herself told, which is not only the better one but has the virtue of being true.
On December 8, 1962, the unions at four of New York’s major newspapers—the Daily News, the Journal-American, the World-Telegram and Sun, and the Times—went on strike. In solidarity, the remainder of the city’s papers—the Daily Mirror, the Herald Tribune, the Post, and both the Long Island Star Journal and the Long Island Daily Press—closed down. For most of those newspapers, it was the beginning of the beginning of the end.
But for Nora it was just the beginning. Not surprisingly, Nora’s stint at the Post was the work of the ubiquitous Navasky. He came up with the idea of Monocle filling the newspaper void with parodies of the stricken publications. They were to do the Times, the News, the Tribune, and the Post.
Dan Wakefield, soon to be a famous magazine writer and novelist, parodied the Post’s pompous columnist Max Lerner. Sidney Zion, a Yale classmate of Navasky’s and at that time an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey, went after Murray Kempton, the most exalted of the Post columnists. Both Lerner and Kempton had distinctive writing styles that lent themselves to parody. Not so Leonard Lyons, who it can be fairly said hardly had any writing style at all. His forte was the harmless, often unctuous, usually pointless anecdote that sometimes did not end but merely trailed off with three dots . . .
“When President John F. Kennedy was inaugurated President, his entire family attended,” Nora wrote in Lyons’s inimitable non-style style. “They include Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy, Eunice and Sargent Shriver, Ethel and Bobby Kennedy, Jean and Steve Smith, Jean and Teddy Kennedy and many others. My wife, Sylvia, who met Kennedy when he was only Senator, remarked to me, ‘He’s older, isn’t he?’ . . . I told the President that story at the party for former Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith at the Waldorf-Astoria. . . . He had a good laugh.”
Lyons did not.
Neither did some of the Post’s editors. The managing editor, Al Davis, wanted to sue—although on what grounds is not clear. A bemused Dorothy Schiff suggested a different tack. “Don’t be idiots,” she supposedly said. “If they can parody us, they can write for us. Hire them!”
This account—which was Nora’s account—sounds apocryphal. The Post, after all, was shuttered and was officially hiring no one. This might account for why it was widely believed that Nora got her job through family connections. Yet Zion told the same story. He got hired on the basis of his Kempton parody—the beginning of a raucous career as a writer and agitator that took him f
rom the Post to the Times to the Daily News.
In due course, Nora moved on. But the newsroom stayed with her, as it does with most people. Newspapering is a job, of course. And after a while it can be like any other—repetitious, boring, predictable. But for a time—and for some that time never comes—it can be a true moveable feast, a term Hemingway misapplied to Paris.
Every day as a journalist you seek the new, the bizarre, the different, the exotic, and of course, the salacious. Every day you seek the stories that other people want to read. You barge into the lives of others, you demand the truth from them, you nod in ersatz sympathy, you pretend—you lie and lie in the proclaimed cause of the truth. You accumulate a lifetime of experiences in a year—maybe a month. You go where most people never do—and where you never will again. There is nothing like it, and no one who has done newspapering ever forgets it or, when life dulls down, doesn’t miss it just a bit.
* * *
Paul Sann, who had taken over from the erudite Columbia graduate James Wechsler as editor (Wechsler remained editorial page editor), was apparently one of those newspapermen who considered a college education an affectation if not a downright hindrance. Sann was a Brooklyn kid and inordinately proud of it. He did not much care for Nora, although she later wrote how much she respected him. Still, within a week of walking in the door at 75 West Street, she went from being a provisional reporter to being a full-fledged one.
The Post was a dump. It occupied two floors of a sagging building built in 1926 and, in a symbolic repudiation of its origins, later converted into a fancy apartment house. It was located in a remote part of the city, up against the Hudson River, which in the winter did its level best to approximate the Bering Sea. The area was frigid. The Post was in Gotham’s gulag.
It was also losing money or, depending on the year, not making much. It wasn’t spending much, either, so that for instance it was a big deal to take a cab to an assignment. Pete Hamill, who started at the paper at the age of sixteen with a degree from nowhere but with the proper attitude, remembered how he’d hope to find a photographer going his way so he could get to an assignment before some building superintendent had hosed the blood off the sidewalk. Photographers had cars. Reporters had the subway.
New York in the 1960s was not so much a city as a collection of tribes. Rather than have markings, the tribes had newspapers. You were what you read, and in the afternoon, if you were middle class and Jewish, you read the New York Post. If you were Catholic and conservative, you read the Journal-American, and if you were Protestant, you read the World-Telegram and Sun. (Protestants were rumored, but never seen.) This peculiar Balkanization suited the publishers of the afternoon papers. “You have the Jews, we have the Protestants, and the Journal-American has the Catholics,” Roy Howard of the World-Telegram and Sun told Schiff, according to a Gail Sheehy profile of her. “Let’s keep it that way.”
The Post was avowedly liberal, pro-union, had swooned for Roosevelt and his New Deal, was staunchly Zionist, and had been enthusiastically opposed to the anti-Communist antics of Joe McCarthy. The paper carried the editorial page cartoon of the Washington Post’s Herbert Block—he signed his drawings “Herblock” and claimed to have coined the term “McCarthyism” in a 1950 cartoon—but few noticed or cared that he was not a New York Post employee. The out-of-towner Herblock became the face of the Post.
But its soul was its owner. The paper had been founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 and bought in 1939 by Schiff, the granddaughter of Jacob Schiff, a German-Jewish financier of immeasurable wealth and well-known philanthropic endeavors. Dorothy, known as Dolly, was different from her parents and grandparents in one enormously important respect: She was a liberal Democrat. In all but her social class, she mirrored both the ethnicity and the politics of her readers. She was one of them—if they happened to be filthy rich, something of a snob, and four times married.
The newspaper that Dorothy Schiff put out and that Nora joined in 1963 was liberal in an era when it was often convenient to make no distinction between liberalism and communism. (Among other things, the Post was the first big city daily to hire an African American reporter—the grandiloquently named but abundantly talented Theodore Roosevelt Poston.) The Jewish community was by far the Post’s most important constituency, but the African American one mattered as well. It was, in fact, the two communities that Calvin Trillin had in mind when he wrote the mock headline, “Cold Snap Hits Our Town. Jews, Negroes Suffer Most.” It was intended for Navasky’s parody of the Post, but it was never used.
Years after leaving the Post, Nora wrote a biting essay about Dorothy Schiff, but there was much to admire in the grande dame. She was, of course, everything Nora said she was: entitled, very rich, and cavalier about the obligation of a newspaper to actually publish news.
On the other hand, Schiff was working with her own money, which had been a bequest to her from her fabulously rich grandparents. Her business was heiress. All she really knew how to do was economize—so much so that her newsroom was a dirty, unsanitary, and fetid mess, the hallway redolent with the smell of urine wafting from the men’s room. “Philthy,” was etched into the dust on the city room’s glass door. It was, though, not nearly as “philthy” as the bathrooms.
A year could go by before anyone in the Post’s newsroom would see Dolly Schiff, but Nora did. She was one of the select few occasionally invited up to lunch with the publisher—sandwiches from the cafeteria—and once she confronted Schiff with a memo she had written as a union rep about the Post’s grubby and decrepit working conditions, particularly the smelly lavatories. Schiff responded that her employees were the sort who could make a mess out of anything.
The Post was unionized, and so Nora’s job was protected. Still, a publisher could make her feelings known—a memo here, a frown there, a remark dropped, and soon the editors got the drift: Keep Ephron out of the paper. Send her to cover cops. At night. That did not happen, of course, because Nora was too valuable and too liked by Schiff, but here again is a display of Nora’s astounding confidence, a conviction not just that she belonged and could not be removed but that she was right. Who could argue? Schiff did not even bother. Mostly, she just ignored Nora’s complaints.
Later, however, Schiff came to rue both her hiring of Nora and her patience with her. She told the Post’s one-time managing editor Robert Spitzler that she rued giving Nora a pass for what was, really, a grave journalistic sin. Nora, it turned out, had written for the New York Times at the same time she was writing for the New York Post. Journalism has few rules, but one of them is that you never write for a competitor.
If Nora did not quite see the Times as a competitor—or, to put it the other way—if she did not quite see the Post as a Times competitor, who could blame her? The Post was an afternoon paper. The Times was morning. One was a racy tab; the other was a broadsheet and proclaimed itself the newspaper of record. Nonetheless, the papers competed and so Nora, faced with a severe prohibition but very much wanting to write for the Times, compromised. On June 11, 1967, an essay appeared in the book review section. It was headlined “Eating and Sleeping with Arthur Frommer.” It was about the man who conceived and published the many books that enabled Americans of modest means to travel almost anywhere in the world on a modest $5 a day. The piece was written by someone named Nora Greenburg. She was identified thusly: “Mrs. Greenburg made her first trip to Europe and the Caribbean guided by ‘$5-a-Day’ guides.”
This Mrs. Greenburg was a dandy writer. Her piece is charming and zippy, humorous, too, but it is also unexpectedly indignant. It turns out that the surprise about “surprising Amsterdam” is that Frommer had a deal with KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, which is why he kept promoting the surprisingly charming Dutch city. Mrs. Greenburg did not approve and she says so.
How Nora expected to get away with writing for the Times while still at the Post is impossible to say. I think she used her married name just to spare Schiff and her editors any embarrassment, but the article
is pure Nora and was bound to be noticed. By then, though, she was on her way out of the Post anyway, heading for a freelance career that would make her a star. She needed that New York Times piece more than she needed the New York Post. In any event, Schiff essentially looked the other way. Nora was retained, but it was seen as proof to some at the Post that she was just passing through on her way to bigger, better, and when it came to the lavatories, less smelly things.
* * *
The taciturn and phlegmatic Schiff withdrew the New York Post from the publisher’s association and resumed printing on March 8, 1963. Almost instantly, Nora’s first story appeared. It involved the fruitless attempt of the New York Aquarium at Coney Island to mate two hooded seals. Nora wrote it funny. She knew she had succeeded when, after submitting her copy, she heard chuckles from the city desk.
Her second article was a sprightly written piece on Tippi Hedren, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. In true Post style, the article was brief and pointless, but it wasn’t supposed to do more than mention the movie and the star, which it did.
No one can recall Nora’s first days at the Post and what exactly compelled her editors to compress the tryout period to a mere and unheard of one week. But she remembered why. She simply went on a rip. She had a fast typewriter, the gift of wit, the eye of a born reporter, and, not the least, a voice. She wrote like she talked—and when she talked, everyone listened.
Nora skipped whole eras of a writer’s life—no awkward beginner’s stuff, no gross mistake of fact, no crazy juvenile error, and no crash-and-burn tryout at some provincial paper. She went straight to the New York Post, which, say what you will about it, was a New York newspaper and the voice of New York liberalism. The paper was read. The paper mattered.
She Made Me Laugh Page 7