* * *
Nora’s dinners were happy, jolly occasions, but the guests were not there just to eat. These were participatory events. Guests were obliged to perform, to make the party better—sometimes to ask a question of the table.
“She would come over to me and she would pull me over to the side and say, ‘Do you have a question?’ ” Tom Hanks recalled. “Meaning that you had to come up with the question that would start off the single conversation. Nora would let the dinner party go for a while and then she would tap the glass and she would say, ‘Okay, now, here’s the question.’ ”
Hanks remembered one night when the guests were given slips of paper and asked to write a brief description of their first job. The slips were then deposited in a pan and picked at random. The idea was to guess which guest had had which job.
Another time, she asked who was to blame for the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Hanks, a frequent guest, was there for that one, too. “We went around the entire table. And everybody said something different. Some people blamed Lewinsky, the White House intern whose affair with Bill Clinton resulted in his impeachment. Some people blamed Linda Tripp, the Lewinsky pal who betrayed her. Some people blamed Ken Starr, the special prosecutor. And it went around the table until it got to Nora and she said, ‘Well I just can’t believe that none of you said Bill Clinton.’ And we all said, ‘Well, yeah, of course it’s that.’ ”
Nora sometimes asked her guests what they would want named for them. Some said a building or a monument, but Nora—or maybe it was me—suggested a dance step, and I—or maybe it was Nora—suggested a sex act. “Are you up to doing a Cohen? (or an Ephron?)” one could ask, either on the dance floor or in bed. At moments like this, the ones of utter confusion and the melding of memories, we would look at each other and laugh. I had once been me. She had once been her. Somewhere along the line, we had become each other’s anecdotes.
No, No, No
* * *
I was once asked by Vanity Fair magazine what Nora might have been had she not become a movie director. I paused just to make it seem that I was thinking, and then I said, “Dictator of Argentina.” I thought the line was both funny and apt, but Nora thought it was neither. When the magazine came out, I got a call from her.
“Y’know, Richard, not everything you say is funny.”
Spoken as a true dictator.
In the years afterward, I had no reason to reassess. Nora was no Eva Peron and she was not one for firing squads, but she had an irrepressible need to run the lives of other people. She did this not because she was a busybody and not because she needed to interfere, but because it was clear to her that some if not all of the people she loved were inexplicably incompetent at everything they did, with the possible exception of what they did for a living. That is why, for instance, she seized control of my son’s bar mitzvah, transforming it from a High Anglican ritual held at a proper hotel on Washington’s very proper Massachusetts Avenue to a raucous, joyous affair of ethnic exuberance held at a New York–type place run by guys named Mo and Joe. L’chaim!
Nora was not content merely to direct her own dinner parties; she took over those of others as well. At one, she commandeered the table and asked the guests to describe the house they grew up in. What followed was not something out of House and Garden, but intimate stories of childhood.
* * *
Twice a year—summer and winter—she would take control of David Geffen’s yacht as surely as if she had boarded with cutlass and blunderbuss. The boat, an astonishing 453 feet long, gave Nora the chance to be her own maître d’. To Geffen’s delight, she chose the menu, organized the seating at dinner, and suggested the game to be played, the movies to be shown, and the sights to see in port. She organized shore expeditions—once to a shop in Sicily that made the world’s best flat bread, or so she maintained. That entailed an hour-and-a-half car ride followed by a hike up a hill and, finally, the shop itself. As promised, the bread was terrific.
The actress Candice Bergen and her husband the real estate developer Marshall Rose were once guests on the Geffen boat at the same time as Nora and Nick. In her book A Fine Romance, Bergen described a week at sea with Nora: “She was an authority on, it seemed, everything. In St. Barths, she came back to the boat with six-packs of some juice no one had ever heard of and then drank all afternoon. She decided the menus on the boat, she did the seating at every meal, she chose the games after dinner and the movies we would watch. She knew everything and the best of everything.”
Just about everyone surrendered to Nora, turning things over to her. Running the Geffen boat—I’m not sure she had it gassed, but I bet she checked the oil—was small potatoes compared to what she did with the super-lawyer David Boies’s sixty-fifth birthday party. His wife, Mary, had planned a weekend of festivities at the Las Vegas hotel they then (2006) favored, the Venetian. She sent an invitation to Nora and Nick. It prompted an immediate phone call.
“No, no, no,” Nora said. “Not the Venetian.”
“But . . .”
“The Bellagio,” Nora ordered. “Call Elaine Wynn,” who along with her then husband, Steve, owned the place.
Mary did not know Elaine Wynn. Mary, an accomplished lawyer and usually fearless, was hesitant to call.
“Fine,” Nora said.
Elaine Wynn called Mary. Soon, she was in New York, and samples of tablecloths, napkins, and other stuff were spread out for Mary to see. Elaine wanted to know what public rooms of the hotel Mary wanted and what colors she favored and what her themes might be.
Mary’s mouth is still agape.
Nora was not yet through with Mary and David Boies. In 2012, they wanted to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Meredith and Tom Brokaw. Again, invitations went out, this time for Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a dandy, bucolic place north of New York City, with impeccable foodie credentials.
“No, no, no,” Nora said.
“But . . .”
“You’re doing it at your place and I’m doing the cooking,” Nora commanded.
Mary pointed out that her apartment could not possibly accommodate sixty people.
Move out the furniture, Nora said.
Move in ten round tables, Nora said.
The party was held on September 7, 2012. The guests ate meat loaf, mashed potatoes, fried chicken—the kind of comfort food Nora had always adored and often served herself. The party was joyous and intimate—but also sad. Nora had died in June.
* * *
I know, I know. The Boieses are rich and famous, and the Brokaws are rich and even more famous, and Nora herself was both. But she was not offering to throw a party for them and then bask in a cloud of puffy air kisses. She was yearning instead to make a good time even better. One of her many gifts was the urge to give, to make life better for the people she cared about. She had not, after all, offered Mary Boies the phone number of her caterer. She had offered to do the cooking. It goes without saying that she knew how to cook. It needs saying that she knew how to love.
Another Opening, Another Show
* * *
For Nora every dinner party was a little movie. We all had our parts to play. She would do the set, which was her apartment, and she had already done the casting and, often, some of the script. But it was up to the “actors” to act. The telling of a story was as important as its content—there was little use in having the latter without the former.
As for me, I was one of Nora’s frequent non-famous guests. She collected many of them, mostly writers, and often women, whose names were recognizable to other writers but not the general public. Nora was not starstruck, although some of her guests surely were. Some nights it seemed that her round table was where the red carpet ended.
* * *
It was possible to flunk dinner party—as if it were a college course. I can’t supply the names of those who did, who were never invited back, but I am sure it happened. I myself felt I had flunked many times. Since I was not famous, I felt I had to be
funny or interesting, but this was a grievous misjudgment of what Nora expected. Her guests might be famous, but while that may have been an admissions ticket, they were also expected to be entertaining in some way. Above all, they had to be both likable and to like the other guests. Nora over time assembled a core cadre of dinner guests. Some were actors and some were directors and some were writers—but what they all had in common was obvious affection for one another.
At a Nora Ephron dinner party, it was often not enough to come up with a topic for discussion; guests were also required to play a game afterward. One of Nora’s favorites was called Running Charades. Guests were divided into two teams, an umpire or judge supervised, and each team was given the same list of items or phrases that comprised a theme. The writer John Leo remembers that an item might be the book title House of Seven Gables, and another might be the Muhammad Ali phrase “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
Each contestant would have to act at least one of these out, and after several more had been performed, some very smart person might connect Clark Gable with Butterfly McQueen and realize that the theme was the movie Gone with the Wind. The team that guessed it in the least amount of time was the winner. It was that simple.
It was also that terrifying. Among Nora’s guests were entertainers like Bob Balaban and his wife, Lynn Grossman, a writer and one-time pianist who had put herself through college accompanying drag queens in piano bars (also conducting tours of Lincoln Center). These were performers. Even so, some performers got stage fright. Diane Keaton one night simply refused to play.
I loved being asked to Nora’s for dinner. Who would be there? What stars? What interesting people? What would she cook? But along with anticipation came anxiety. The invitation was similar to being asked to make a toast: How nice. How flattering. But how nerve-wracking. The desire for applause, for acknowledgment as a wit, was more than offset by the fear of failure. I had seen the funniest men of my day flame out at some event or other. Being a dinner party guest of Nora’s was not quite the same, of course, but one was expected to sparkle at dinner and then, afterward, to act out some nonsense word or phrase in a game of Running Charades. It was beyond me.
I would meet the challenge of, say, acting out “Clark Gable” by exploding into a sweat. The entire effort was an exercise in post-traumatic stress disorder, reliving moments from high school when the teacher called me to the blackboard to solve a geometry problem. I would stare at the triangles and rectangles much as Napoleon’s troops much have stared at the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta stone, and no meaning would announce itself. “Clark Gable” was a geometry problem with a mustache and dimples.
The “teacher,” in this case Nora, took the games very seriously. Everyone knew that and was appropriately intimidated. Once, a flummoxed player, frustrated to the point of criminal insanity, inadvertently blurted out the word she was supposed to be acting out. It was a reckless, virtually suicidal thing to do, and Nora exploded. She stopped the game and said, “We do not play this way. That’s cheating.”
The “cheater” looked stricken.
Holy shit! a guest exclaimed.
Once—just once—I cheated. It was more of a prank than an actual cheat, but, anyway, I got my entire team to go along and we ran away with the game.
Nora was dismayed that she had lost—or, maybe, that I had won. I felt regret, remorse, as if I had made her lose confidence in herself. Out of pity, I owned up. I cheated, I announced, thinking that getting away with cheating was more of a triumph than winning the game. She was dumbfounded, stunned, uncomprehending. I had cheated? What kind of person would do such a thing? What kind of person would treat a game as if it was, well, a game? I felt as if I had burst some kind of bubble, like telling a kid that there is no Santa Claus. For a painful moment, I feared our friendship would not survive, as if I had cheated on her.
* * *
The essence of Nora was her work—her writing. No, that’s not right. The essence for me was Nora herself. And I could say, too, that the essence of Nora was those games. She had a severity that could frighten people, frighten the very same people who loved her. She had a strange power that compelled people to play games they did not enjoy—as if they understood, in some Marxian way, that they had to do this bit for the greater good of the party.
Nora knew her power. She knew how much she meant to people. Those people were not always aware of her insecurities and how much she sometimes needed them. But with very few exceptions—Mike Nichols, Bob Gottlieb (her editor at Knopf), Amanda Urban, and possibly (but not always) me—she was the dominant one in every relationship. (Her marriage to Nick was in a different category.)
It wasn’t that Nora was one of those characters with multiple personalities. The overall personality, the character trait, was love, affection, caring solicitude. When her friends were in trouble, they turned to Nora. They didn’t even have to turn. When the wife of the performer Martin Short died, Nora and Nick just arrived at the house with food. She brought food the next night and the next and “on the fourth night, she arrived with a giant platter of fried chicken.”
“I said, ‘Nora, it’s just the kids and me,’ ” Short said. “ ‘We have so much food already.’ She handed me the platter and said, ‘And now you have more food.’ ”
When Nancy Dolman Short died in 2010, Marty Short was already famous and successful and a charter member, if there could be such a thing, of a clique of the celebrated who cruised the Mediterranean in the summer and the Caribbean in the winter on David Geffen’s boat. So Nora’s solicitousness could be seen as either the attention due a friend or the attention due a star. But the attention and sympathy she gave Short in those days—and many after—were hardly any different from the way she reacted when a somewhat less famous writer named Deborah Copaken Kogan, whose book Shutterbabe Nora had admired, called her in East Hampton in something of a panic: She was thinking of leaving her husband.
While they were on the phone, Nora checked the bus schedule and had Kogan come out from Manhattan. She served her lunch, temporarily resolved the marital situation—and put her on the next bus back to the city. Nora gave that writer more than a quickie meal and some wise words. She gave her an afternoon—time. In the short run, she had no more of that than anyone else. In the long run, she had less.
By the time Nora met Kogan, Nora was already a famous person. But this ability of Nora’s to engender trust was not dependent on celebrity or popularity, but was, for want of a better word, innate. Back in her high school days she became the confessor to Barry Diller, a Beverly Hills kid himself who lived about two blocks from her and who was a frequent companion as they walked to and from school. Diller was to become a media magnate, a billionaire, but, more to the point, an occasionally irascible and coldly methodical tycoon. He opened up to Nora. They were two years apart in age, Nora the older one, and she was in some ways the worldlier one. His feelings for her, always complicated, came out in verbal spasms of contradictions:
“It was not hard to know why I talked to her. Not that she was wise. But I trusted her, I trusted her. I don’t know if trusted her. I talked to her, I did talk to her.”
Tough Knows Tough
* * *
As far as I was concerned, that “Holy shit!” was way overdue. I knew of Nora’s penchant for overreacting to some perceived slight—something she would take very personally but that was meant innocently. Years before, she had come to my house in Washington for dinner and another of the guests was Patrick Caddell, then a very big deal as President Jimmy Carter’s in-house pollster and political adviser. Caddell brought a date, a young woman—a very young woman—whose contribution to the conversation—was it about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?—was to refer to Communists as “reds.” I flinched. Such a retrograde word! So 1950s. So . . .
Nora hit the roof.
“Reds? she demanded. “Reds!” she repeated. Her voice was loud. She was indignant. “Who says reds anymore?”
T
he young woman instantly recoiled. She clearly meant nothing by the word. She clearly was unaware of its McCarthyite provenance or that Nora’s parents had lived through the Hollywood blacklist, the Red Scare, and were themselves liberals, as, for that matter, was their daughter. She knew none of that. “Reds!” The word had somehow come tripping lightly off her tongue. It had hit the floor like a sack of rocks.
The very young woman instantly deflated. Explanations aborted in her throat. She gagged on second thoughts. She could say nothing. The verbal blows rained down on her. “Reds!” My God, she had said “Reds.”
She was just a kid. It didn’t matter what she’d said. This was child abuse. I was appalled.
Holy shit! I thought.
Nora was tough. She was tough in her writing, sending laser-like sentences from her keyboard to the printed page or the Internet, and she was tough in her personal life. Everyone who knew her—everyone who loved her—knew that, recognized that, and either felt her wrath or feared her wrath. She could turn suddenly dismissive, not in so many words—although the words would be there—but in body language, in a look, and then she would somehow inhale room temperature air and exhale frost. Almost anything could trigger such a reaction—a business dispute, an act of disloyalty, mistreatment of a friend, lack of respect, or something else entirely. It was the last category that was the most frightening because it was so ill defined, so impossible to anticipate. All the victim knew was that one day his or her relationship with Nora went from animated to inert. The loss—the loss of such a cherished friend—was incalculable, but what made it worse was the realization that she was not just a pal but the nexus of your social life. You had not merely lost a friend. You had lost a social set.
She Made Me Laugh Page 9