She Made Me Laugh
Page 8
Astoundingly, she was already giving advice to other novices on how to how to handle themselves in the big time. “She told me never admit you don’t know something,” Lynn Sherr said. Pretend you do. Walk out of the building and go right to a phone booth and then call someone and ask where you go.”
And how do you get to where you have to go? The subway. Beverly Hills raised, yes, Wellesley educated, again yes. But Nora became a master of the subways, which daunted her not one bit. Many years later, when she was a rich movie director and screenwriter, she’d still hop on the subway to swiftly get to where she had to go. She called it “magical.”
At the Post, Nora was used mostly as a feature writer and she frequently wrote a staple called “Woman in the News.” The profiles were usually tied to some sort of manufactured event—the publication of a book, the opening of a movie—and they were not intended to be either biting or particularly candid. It was sometimes hard to tell if Nora had even laid eyes on the subject, never mind interviewed her.
For instance, she wrote a profile of Sybil Burton, the ex-wife of the actor Richard Burton, who had absconded with Elizabeth Taylor. The ex–Mrs. Burton had founded a New York discotheque named Arthur, but the peg for the story was not her former marriage or her current nightclub, but her marriage a week earlier to Jordan Christopher, who was, Nora tells us in the very first paragraph, a mere twenty-four while his bride was thirty-six. She quotes from various sources but never, it seems, directly from Burton. The piece was mostly, maybe entirely, a clip job.
The term “clip job” is almost always used pejoratively since it entails a lack of reporting—journalistic laziness, in other words. But all the articles in Newsweek and Time were versions of clip jobs, since one person did the reporting and another did the writing. The ability to take some old newspaper clippings and turn them into a vivid story was a valued talent at afternoon newspapers. Nora was a master of that art.
This is Nora doing Doris Day: “That little twinkle in the eyeball and crinkle ’round the eye, and blue, pink, yellow, Easter egg colors with sunshine, smiles and freckles.” That week, the actress of almost pornographic wholesomeness had “for the umpteenth time [been] named the biggest box office draw on Earth.” Nora went on to paint a portrait of an emotionally tangled woman, more attached to animals than people, somewhat reclusive, who converted to Christian Science via Catholicism and Unitarianism and who was “close to a nervous breakdown because she thought she had breast cancer or tuberculosis” but who finally saw a doctor at the insistence of her husband, himself a convert to Christian Science via Judaism.
It is all there. A jumble of religions, a train wreck of contradictory facts—cancer or TB, a Christian Science husband who calls in the doctor. The article was accompanied by a photo of the gleaming Ms. Day, looking off into the proverbial middle distance and appearing, at the same time, a bit more frantic than happy. Nora, it seems, was nowhere near her. The closest she got was an apparent telephone interview. It was so brief and so anodyne that almost none of it is quoted, but Nora noted what Day herself called her personal gem: her recipe for ice cream and pretzels.
“We take very thin, crispy pretzels and have a big dish of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Oh, it’s great.”
Nora did the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory and the TV personality George Gobel and the actor Kirk Douglas. She wrote about teenage drinking and female drug addiction and over and over again about the Beatles. (Their arrival in New York is something she talked about for the rest of her life.) “Well, friends,” she wrote on one occasion, “guess what happened Friday night at the Beatles concert in Forest Hills? About 26,000 Beatle fans—most of them young girls who are willing to spend their allowance—came and did The Shriek.”
She wrote a piece on Monocle magazine and somehow suppressed the urge to disclose that she had once dated its publisher and creator, Victor Navasky. She went to Washington for the visit of Britain’s Princess Margaret and her husband, the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, and then returned for the wedding of President Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Bird, to Charles Robb, a Marine destined to become a U.S. senator. For that one, she got “the wood,” a page one headline so huge the mold for it had to be made out of wood.
Most of what Nora wrote was routine, tabloid boilerplate. Afternoon newspapers were always written on the run. Stories were sometimes dictated over the phone to rewritemen (or women) who were required to keep a cigarette in their mouth and a flask in the drawer. (One of mine at the Washington Post even quoted the words of a bank robber—“Stick ’em up,” he had him say. I had him take it out.) Bit by bit, though, peeks of the real Nora can be glimpsed glowing under the punchy modifiers. In a story about a discharged high school teacher, Nora noticed the kids hanging around the school. They “smoked cigarettes rather badly,” she observed.
She posed as a rich man’s wife and pretended to be interested in renting a $5,000-a-month apartment in the Carlyle Hotel. After that, she wrote that she went home to her own $135-a-month apartment, where she kept “the golf clubs in the hall.” Since I never knew Nora to play golf, the hallway is where her clubs must have remained.
Yet again she pretended to be on the hunt for a home and went to see the one being sold by the hugely popular TV comedian Jackie Gleason. The place was anything but conventional. Again she played ordinary housewife. “How would I dust a television set suspended from the ceiling over the round bed with the round sheets and the round blanket?” she asked.
Nora was emerging as a name, a recognized byline. News stories are conveyed by the material, the facts, the data—the what-where-when-and-how of them. Bylines are extraneous and were once awarded sparingly, the conceit being that it didn’t matter who wrote the story. What mattered was the story.
With feature stories it was a different matter. They required good writing, and so good writers got noticed. They brought an eye to what they did. They demanded attention: Look at it my way. Nora made you look. Nora made you look at it her way.
Nora learned quite a bit at the Post. She learned to write fast and she learned how to report and she learned how to conduct herself in a newsroom mostly populated by men, although she was far from the only woman on the staff. Most of her colleagues liked her and some of the women felt she was special. One of them was Helen Dudar, who had started at the Post way back in 1956 and had married Peter Goldman, the Newsweek writer. When she died, Goldman asked Nora to write a commemorative essay for The Attentive Eye, a book of Dudar’s writings he had compiled. A man might have written about Dudar’s writing skills. And Nora did. A man might have written how fast Dudar was on the typewriter—“She was, in a city room full of world-class rewritemen, the greatest rewriteman of all.”
It might seem that Nora made a man out of Dudar, when, in fact, she had simply shattered the sexist categories, and anyway she quickly moved on to other things she admired about Dudar, and they included her fish soup with rouille, her copper pots, and her love for the South of France. The rewrite man was a girl after all.
* * *
Nora’s years at the Post taught her that she was special—that she had the gift. She discovered that she could write fluidly and fast, teasing the deadline like a matador does the bull. Beyond that, though, she had an unmistakable voice, that ineffable quality that’s so difficult to explicate and so impossible to miss.
She was present in every story, talking to the reader in a direct and engaging way. The stories were always about something—a crime, an accident, an opening, a closing—but always in some way about her. A Nora Ephron piece was like a Hemingway short story: distinct.
Nora was twenty-one when she skewered Leonard Lyons. She was just starting out in journalism. What you want—at least what I wanted—was to be welcomed into the circle of journalists, to be recognized as one of the boys by the boys themselves. Nora had no need for that—and no apparent fear, either, that she could make enemies that would block her career path. The Leonard Lyons piece was an exam
ple of Nora’s bristling self-confidence, as if she knew that the world would judge her on the basis of her writing and not on who her writing happened to hurt. By hiring her, Dorothy Schiff, of all people, proved her right.
In January 1967, Nora wrote a series for the Post on Johnny Carson, host of NBC’s late-night show. This was both a coup and a triumph, hardly an assignment to be given to just anyone. Carson, by then the most popular figure on television, was also the most enigmatic, and a series about him was bound to be well read. Nora did not disappoint.
The writing was staccato. You can almost hear the typewriter keys hitting the paper, the return of the carriage, and a new sentence beginning. The writing is fast, simple, the details slipped in like dolphins curving into the water.
To Nora, Carson himself is cocooned, unknowable, and renowned for being a blank. Politicians come on his show, but he avoids talking politics. He eschews complexity, possibly thought itself. He hates interviews. “He submits to them, sitting in his newly upholstered gold couch in his newly decorated office paneled in wood-patterned Formica,” she wrote. Johnny Carson was then making $1 million a year, with thirteen weeks off so he could play Las Vegas, where he made $40,000 a week. He could have had any kind of office he wanted. Do you want to know about Johnny Carson? Nora asked her New York Post readers. Come into his office and notice the “wood-patterned Formica.”
A year later she expanded her series into a book titled and now . . . Here’s Johnny! In her acknowledgments, she mentioned some of her Post colleagues as well as her friend Anne Navasky, “for wanting to be acknowledged.” Finally, she acknowledged the famous author Dan Greenburg. He was about to become her husband.
How to Be a Jewish Housewife
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Nora was a throwback, not just to the Algonquin Round Table, but farther back and across the ocean. She was a latter-day salonnière, an updated version of the well-off Jewish women of nineteenth-century Berlin and Vienna who advanced science and medicine, as well as gossip, until most of them assimilated by converting to Christianity and faded into history. The most famous of them was probably Rahel Varnhagen, so dazzling a personality that the German émigré and New York intellectual Hannah Arendt one hundred years later considered the dead woman her best friend. (Arendt’s real best friend was Mary McCarthy, the American writer whose feud with Lillian Hellman Nora chronicled in her play Imaginary Friends.)
Nora’s purpose, unlike Varnhagen’s, was not to effect assimilation or discuss the scientific or medical advances of the day—although no topic was off the table—but just to have a bang-up conversation and a rollicking good time. The laughs, though, had to be underpinned by a wry sophistication, a tart knowledge of “the business,” a familiarity with politics and foreign affairs, a preferred—but not required—liberalism, and a gift for performance. A good story had to be well told, otherwise why tell it?
* * *
In 1967, Nora made two significant moves. She left the Post and she got married. Dan Greenburg was a Chicago-born former advertising man who in his spare time had written his Jewish mother best seller. The book was excerpted in Playboy, of all places, tucked in among the fabulous breasts and ribald humor. Greenburg was, in fact, a Playboy writer, published there frequently.
Nora and Dan were fixed up by the omnipresent Navaskys. The four had dinner, and Nora and Dan hit it off and started to date. First it was a Friday night–Saturday night sort of affair, then one more day was added and then another, and then, Dan recalled, “there were no days left, so we moved in together”—or, to be a more accurate, Nora moved into Dan’s place, a cozy duplex at 67th Street and Fifth Avenue.
On April 9, 1967, Nora and Dan were married in Rockefeller Center’s famous Rainbow Room, where Dan, from his old advertising days, had connections. Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, a founder of the Reconstructionist branch of Judaism, presided. It was, as far as I can tell, Nora’s last brush with a rabbi. Neither her marriage nor the rabbi went the distance.
The Ephron-Greenburg marriage was perfect . . . on paper. They were both smart and witty and both writers. Dan was famous, Nora less so, but she was the impresario of the many dinner parties they gave. “Nora was somebody who had an incredible gift,” Dan recalled. “She could walk up to a celebrity and say, ‘Hi, my name is Nora Ephron and I’m a reporter for the New York Post. Would you like to come to dinner?’ Hardly anyone said no because she was so appealing.”
Dan, on the other hand, was somewhat shy and unskilled in the art of entertainment. “I would not know how to give a dinner party. I have all the social finesse of somebody who was raised by wolverines.”
Dan was possibly the first to notice Nora’s gift for collapsing the vaunted six degrees of separation, the notion that one can reach anyone in the world through an introduction to six people. Nora had it down to one—herself—and in later years anyone who knew her knew that she knew anyone you wanted to reach. I exaggerate just a bit by saying that if I wanted to get in touch with the Pope, I would first call Nora. She’d know how.
Nora’s early dinner parties, the ones she threw with Dan, established her presence in New York. She went through literary-journalistic-showbiz Gotham like a kid on monkey bars, swinging from one person to another to another. At someone else’s party, she and Dan met the director Frank Perry, whose first film, David and Lisa, had been a low-budget hit. Perry had since become a big-time director and was casting his western Doc, which was to star Stacy Keach and Faye Dunaway, with a script by Pete Hamill. It was to shoot in Spain. Perry needed someone for the part of a character named Clum. He took one look at Greenburg and said, “That face, that face. I have to have that face in my movie.” Perry promised to send the script the next day.
Nothing arrived.
Nora responded with a dinner party. She invited Perry; and he was, as intended, suitably impressed by the other guests: Mike Nichols, the screenwriter Buck Henry, and the as-famous writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Perry, who spoke a Hollywood-hipster patois, said to Greenburg, “This is peers-ville, man. This is peers-ville, man. In other words, you’re on my level and it’s safe to send you a script.” He did. And after a trip to Spain and some makeup, Greenburg became “Clum.”
‘What’s My Line?’ Redux
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To those who knew her name, Nora Ephron was a movie director and a writer—or maybe the other way around. To those who knew her, Nora Ephron was a hostess—an impresario of the round table, whose invitations were cherished and, in some respects, feared. She learned early the value of home cooking and celebrity. The combo had gotten Dan his part in a Frank Perry western. All it took was some dazzling guests and some really good food.
Nora had been giving dinner parties since leaving Wellesley. She had made a study of what worked and what did not. Early on, she had leased an apartment on University Place in Greenwich Village because it was above a restaurant that offered takeout. Lack of money was no reason not to have dinner parties, she felt.
But after a while, no takeout was used. Nora did the cooking. She did the cooking because she liked to cook, and she was good at it, but also because her food was an offering, a gift—an expression of her affection for her guests. For Nora, food was an embrace, and the hugs she offered so parsimoniously were placed on the table.
The Nora Ephron dinner party soon took on outsized meaning and importance. It was calculated. She had studied the art of hospitality. Famously, she insisted on a round table for dinner, not in mimicry of the Algonquin’s but upon instruction from the cookbook author and entrepreneur of home entertaining Lee Bailey. He told her—he showed her—that it facilitated conversation.
Interesting people were invited and required—or so they thought—to say interesting things. Nora often announced the subject with a sharp tinkle of the wineglass. If there were more than eight guests, then there had to be two tables, each one weighted, like an airplane’s luggage compartment, with celebrities or personalities. No good loading one table with loudmouths and t
he other with listeners. This thing had to be calibrated. I was often seated to Nora’s right, why I do not know, since we had probably talked earlier that day, certainly that week, and we had nothing to say to each other. Still, I was pleased.
For many of her friends, Nora was a one-person admissions committee. If she was interested or intrigued, she would extend an invitation to lunch. Some people got invited once and then never again. Others were asked back—dinner, poker, or other games. Many of them felt not just complimented by her friendship but honored. Her acceptance of them testified not just to their fame—lots of others were even more famous—but to their wit, their intellect, their personality.
By the time Steven Spielberg met Nora, he was fabulously rich, not to mention famous and incredibly powerful and influential. Probably no movie director has ever been as successful, and the success came at a remarkably young age. Before he had turned thirty, he had made Jaws. He soon was a producer, owned a studio, and was turning out hit after hit. Steven Spielberg had become the wealthiest, most powerful, and possibly the most creative figure Hollywood had ever produced—and yet, somewhere in his own mind, he remained a kid from various suburbs while Nora was an urbane figure taken right off the tiny black-and-white screen of his boyhood TV set.
“I felt like I had met the original panel of What’s My Line? all wrapped up in one person,” Spielberg said.
Steve Martin felt no differently. He, too, had had huge success—writer, comic, musician, novelist, and playwright, and, not incidentally, an art collector with a keen eye. It nevertheless took Nora’s acceptance and friendship for him to feel recognition as something more than a comic.
“I had made it in a kind of stand-up and . . . I didn’t feel I belonged in that [her] company,” he told me.