She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  “She sort of ran the city,” Scott Rudin, the theatrical and film producer, said.

  “You didn’t want to be on the wrong side of her. You know what I mean. She could be cutting, as you know, tough. You cross her selectively.”

  And yet the same people who feared Nora loved her. Of course, the people who feared her admired her, but love is an emotional metric beyond that, and love is what they felt. It’s hard to explain how someone could be both feared and loved—maybe parents have that quality, and military leaders and coaches of football and other sports—but in Nora’s case some of the fear had to do with losing her love. She was so charming, so smart, so witty, and so sweet that if she turned cold, it was more than an emotional rebuff, it was a failure: You had flunked Nora.

  I luxuriated in Nora. I loved the life she offered me—the food I ate, the plays, the screenings, the people I met, the conversations we had—the fun, the laughs, and after a while, the shared history. We were like an old married couple. No one—with the exception of her sisters, especially Delia—knew her as long as I did, and possibly none knew her as well.

  Maybe more important—at least to me—is that no one knew me as well. We had been through so much together—the breakup of her marriage and two of mine, her comically misguided relationship with a guy who took her to shoot birds in Georgia, the affair with Joe Fox and then the lasting one with Nick, the hurt over the Heartburn reviews, the distressing period of movie flops, the challenge of raising two sons in a Manhattan where the subway to anywhere was right downstairs, the upheavals of her father, and the times I came to her with a bruised heart and chaotic plans and she calmly talked me into a soft landing. Once she gave me permission to marry. Once she gave me permission to divorce. Both times it was the same woman.

  I felt romantic toward Nora, which means I loved her, which means I loved walking next to her, sitting next to her, watching her cook. I loved shopping with her, which meant I was shopping for a gift and she was helping me. I loved her smile, loved to make her laugh—loved that above all—loved the sense that we shared so much but sometimes not our political views. I supported the war in Iraq, the one that led to the American occupation, and she did not. I assured her it would not lead to an increase in terrorism but might extinguish the threat. I was wrong, of course, and she was right, and only once did she ever acknowledge that. It happened one night at dinner when I confessed that I was wrong and she, nodding, said something like “I’ll say”—and, mercifully, left it at that.

  * * *

  I loved her when she was irrational or emotional or whatever you might call it. I loved her when she told off the Secret Service agents who had the audacity to forbid our cab from pulling over to the curb at some Washington event just because the vice president was about to arrive. I loved her when she flipped off those waiters in Naples and when, right after her wedding with Carl, she told off the limo driver who had taken Third Avenue uptown and not the FDR Drive.

  I loved her the many times I stayed with her—the apartment at the Apthorp on Broadway and the houses in the Hamptons. The first was called Trees. It was located in Bridgehampton and was named for the huge elms on the property. The house was an attempt at a Victorian. Nora and Carl spiffed it up and put in a pool with a telephone jack nearby. That enabled Carl to call me in tropical Washington—he on a rubber raft in the pool, I encased in industrial air conditioning. I felt painfully deprived.

  Over time, I became the Nora interpreter. I supposedly knew her well enough to explain her, but it took a while. She got less complicated as she got older, warmer and less guarded. After a while, I could see beneath the jokes, and sometimes, as when a person gets hit the wrong way by an unflattering light, I could see the cracks of insecurity and notice when the touch was less than sure. That came with time, an accretion of cuts, the occasional calamity, and then I wanted to engulf her, but I rarely did. We exchanged vows—“I love you,” “I love you”—and left it at that. I sometimes had to recall her words, those words, when she turned distant, and then I had to remember that she was scared of something.

  I loved her even when I did not love her. I loved her when the phone went dead or I felt a chill and resigned myself to the fact that our friendship had inexplicably gone cool. I resolved not to care and every day I did. She frightened me, God only knows how she did it, and I would question our relationship and what I was getting out of it. Yes, it was wonderful to be her friend. Yes, it was flattering to be included in her guest list. Yes, I basked a bit in reflected fame and the celebrity swoosh of entering a many-starred restaurant, our table, always the best table, materializing with a proper grovel. But none of that came close to explaining why she meant so much to me. I still don’t know the answer—but, surely, one of the reasons that I loved her is that, just as surely, she did.

  Mouseburgers, Mush, and Breasts

  * * *

  Helen Gurley Brown was one of the most celebrated magazine editors of her time. Remarkably, when she took over Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965, as a female editor she was a rarity, and she immediately changed both the style and the content of the magazine. No longer was it targeted at the suburban housewife. The “single girl” took her place. If the suburban housewife was obsessed with her husband and her kids, the single girl had but one thing on her mind: sex. Cosmo told her when to do it, how to do it, and to do it as often as she pleased. The formula worked, and the magazine, either sexist or liberated depending on your point of view, took off. Circulation and advertising rocketed. Helene Gurley Brown became both controversial and famous. She was something new under the sun. So was Nora. She profiled Brown for Esquire.

  By the late 1960s, Nora was one of the more successful freelance writers in New York. Magazines in the 1970s were not only influential but prosperous. They paid well—well enough so that it was the goal of many a newspaper reporter to become a freelance magazine writer. Nora had achieved just that. She wrote for New York, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s, Ms., and Esquire, as well as frequently for the New York Times. In fact, it was Nora’s Esquire profile of Helen Gurley Brown that caught the eye of Lee Eisenberg, a young editor at the magazine. Just a year earlier, he had been a senior at the University of Pennsylvania and had entered a contest devised by Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, to rewrite a single issue’s captions and headlines. By September, he was a junior editor at Esquire and under enormous pressure to come up with story ideas.

  Eisenberg submitted so many ideas for articles that he feared he had emptied his mind. Then he recalled the Penn campus and the books that were selling there: Love Story by Erich Segal and anything by Rod McKuen.

  Segal was an English professor at Yale, and McKuen was a songwriter, poet, and entertainer who, along with countless millions of others, had fallen in love with himself.

  “And I said maybe there’s a story here, sort of a dual profile of these two guys who are ridiculously mawkish and sentimental,” he remembered. “But they must be selling tons of books even on an urban, radical college campus—was that an idea?”

  Hayes said yes.

  So Eisenberg took his idea to Don Erickson, who was the managing editor, and Erickson asked him who he thought should get the assignment.

  “What about the woman who wrote the mouseburger story?” he suggested.

  “Nora Ephron?”

  “I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s the one.’ ”

  The “mouseburger” story was Nora’s February 1970 profile of Brown, and in it Brown had referred to her readers—many of them timid and quite lost as to how to conduct themselves in a world that had turned threateningly sexual—as “mouseburgers.”

  “If you’re a little mouseburger, come with me,” Brown had said. “I am a mouseburger and I will help you. You’re so much more wonderful than you think.” And so on.

  Nora turned him down.

  Dismayed, Eisenberg reported the rebuff to Hayes, who suggested another try. This time, Eisenberg mailed Nora a reworked version of the memo he had originally wri
tten to Hayes—and it worked. She would do the article. It was called “Mush.”

  The piece was pure Nora. It was chatty, with a between-you-and me tone to it. It combined standard third-person journalism—the eye of the writer focused on the twin subjects and their phenomenal overnight success—and then the sudden switch to the first person: “It’s not entirely easy to interview McKuen, you see.”

  Suddenly, the reader was in her shoes, seeing McKuen her way, which was as loquacious, meandering, maudlin, self-venerating, and entirely genuine—a mediocrity writing at the top of his game.

  It was the same with Segal. He, too, was not the phony New York critics took him for, his professorship at Yale notwithstanding. He, too, had done his best. Love Story, the much-scorned and parodied movie and book—the movie came before the book—was really the best he could do. Its lachrymose ending was not the product of a highly educated man playing the indifferently educated reader for a sucker. It was what he felt. He, too, was moved by the death scene ending.

  “When I got to the end of the book, it really hit me. I said, ‘Omigod,’ and I came and sat in that very chair and I cried and cried and cried.” The last time he had cried, he told Nora, was at his father’s funeral.

  The demolition job was complete. Both men had failed to meet Nora’s standards. It would have been all right with her, I think, if she had discovered them both to be phonies, really good writers who had mastered the art of turning out the literary equivalents of Margaret Keane’s big-eyes paintings. That would have been something. But these guys were on the up-and-up, totally legit, and, once unmasked, unforgivably boring. If their readers believed in them, it was understandable. So did they.

  * * *

  The piece got Nora a perch at Esquire—a regular column about women—which she soon used to publish an article that is still remembered for its shocking honesty, its deadpan humor, its timing (it was about time someone said that), and its craft. It was a tour de force in the art of the essay. “A Few Words About Breasts” is still remembered, it still resonates. It made Nora both famous and infamous and has been widely misread since 1972 as a self-deprecating trifle—shocking, yes, and coruscatingly honest, yes, but, all in all, funny. But as in Heartburn, her novel that was to follow, the humor camouflaged considerable anger. “Breasts” was a deeply felt howl against a world that cherished big bosoms and the women who had them.

  The essay was published in May, which was a month before a collection of misfits in the pay of the Nixon White House burglarized the office of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building in Washington. Watergate drew Nora to Washington for New York magazine, but unbeknownst to her, it was at the same time drawing Carl Bernstein to the Washington Post’s city desk, where he was hanging around, finagling the chance to get in on what he thought would be a great story. He got the assignment and, in due course, Nora.

  By the time she came down to Washington to write some Watergate stuff, she was already famous—not nationally famous, not as famous as she was to become, not movie star famous, but well known, especially in journalist circles. I had read her. I knew who she was and I knew, too, about her breasts piece. It had given her that fame. The article was bold in its subject matter, light in its touch, but it was not seen as the rant of a hurt woman but rather as the biting observations of a gifted writer. That, at least, was the way I read the article, until one night at dinner in a Japanese restaurant in the Washington suburbs, when Nora proved me wrong.

  Nora, Carl, Barbara, and I were joined by another couple. The man was Michael Levett. The woman was Patti Sterne. Levett had run George McGovern’s presidential campaign in Maryland and was a rising political operative. It was Sterne, however, who mattered that night. Nora took one look at her bust and exploded.

  “Tits!” she exclaimed. “What is it with you guys and tits?”

  This is my recollection, and it is traumatically clear. Patti’s recollection is different. In hers, she and Nora got into a heated argument over Dolly Parton’s use of her voluminous breasts to advance her career. Parton had been a country-western singer who was going mainstream—and helping her go was an astounding figure. Patti was sympathetic. What was the poor woman to do? Nora was contemptuous. She was just flaunting the damn things.

  Much later, there was a similar incident. This time the locale was the Hamptons and Nora was giving a dinner party, and Levett showed up accompanied by another buxom woman, an entertainment lawyer. Nora took one look and exploded again. “Tits! What is it with you men and tits? You haven’t changed at all.”

  It’s possible that Patti has it right. It’s possible I’ve transposed the incidents. It’s not possible, though, that Nora did not at one point have that explosion, and it’s not possible, either, that she was not as formed by her teenage looks as Freud insisted we all are by our infancy. Her body and her brain were out of synch. The former was nondescript and unremarkable. The latter was extraordinary, effervescent, and sparkling, and it took her places where the ticket of admission was frequently a C cup or better.

  Nora went where the pretty girls went. She did not have their advantage, and while she did not necessarily resent them for it, she most certainly resented women who rued their good looks, who pretended—it had to be pretense, didn’t it?—that a big bust or drop-dead prettiness was a problem. No one took them seriously for their brains, they complained. Nora begged to differ. She wrote, in fact, that they were “full of shit.”

  * * *

  Nora came by her indignation honestly. She had had the misfortune of being a teenage non-looker, afflicted with a 1950s deformity—small breasts in the sweater girl era. Sex was repressed, but not breasts. They came flying at you like the intimidating bumpers of 1950s cars, torpedoes lashed to the front of high school girls, the first thing you saw, the last thing you remembered. Even the title of Nora’s first collection of essays, Wallflower at the Orgy, reflected not just the journalist’s anomie—that necessary detachment—but her insistence that if she did indeed go to an orgy and lie naked on the floor, she would be stepped over by men on the way to someone else.

  “Nora was not pretty,” Barry Diller remembers from their high school days. Diller’s recollection is not entirely borne out by pictures from that time, but never mind. He was there and I was not, and his recollection is so clear that when later he and Nora maintained a distant relationship he attributed it to his special knowledge.

  “It was almost as if Nora felt in a little way that I knew her in her ugly period,” Diller said.

  Nora made her physique into one rollicking joke, a shtick—a façade. She managed to turn being flat chested into the functional equivalent of being stacked.

  Whatever Nora was back at Beverly Hills High, she had left it far behind by the time I met her. As she aged, she got prettier and prettier. By her fifties, she had become very attractive. In a clutch of middle-aged women, she was the good-looking one. She watched her weight, ate sparingly, drank little and never to the point of tipsiness, and had learned how to dress. Gone were some of the more outré outfits, for example a black jumpsuit apparently of Martian provenance which she wore one night and made the mistake of asking me my opinion. “You look like a Japanese policeman,” I jokingly said. I had no idea what that meant, but it stung. Her face fell. Years later, she brought it up. I should have called the outfit “memorable.”

  * * *

  The “Breasts” piece—explosive and unforgettable—was not assigned to Nora by one of her Esquire editors. She wrote it as a regular columnist writing under the heading “Women” with the intention of getting more women to read what had once been a men’s magazine. But Esquire, while occasionally randy, was in fact excessively literary. It had published Hemingway in its first issue (1933) and numerous times thereafter. It also published John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald frequently and a woman who could have been a Nora role model, Helen Lawrenson. (Like Nora, she wrote effortlessly and candidly about sex. Her “Latins Are Lousy Lovers” g
ot Esquire banned in Cuba and her “A Few Words on Fellatio” has an echo in Nora’s “A Few Words About Breasts.”)

  By the 1960s, Esquire was publishing Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin, and Gay Talese. A compilation of Esquire articles published in the sixties, Smiling Through the Apocalypse, billboarded twenty-four writers on the cover—not one a woman. Esquire still fashioned itself a men’s magazine, and it still featured the hopelessly innocent drawings of fantasy women by Alberto Vargas. He used as his model a fifteen-year-old girl.

  Along came Nora. She was not only a woman, but she was writing for women. Best of all, she was no doctrinaire feminist, which did not mean that she didn’t believe in what was then called “women’s lib,” but that she did not swallow it all whole. She had a hard time with any movement or person, for that matter, that did not have a sense of humor. Feminism was hopelessly humorless.

  At the same time, there could be no doubt about where Nora stood on the feminist issues of the day. Everything she did was in keeping with its tenets. It was how she was leading her life and how she was writing. Many of the major female writers of the time adamantly refused to write as women. Their aim, in effect, was to be one of the boys, and since most of them had overcome the rigorous doctrinaire sexism of previous decades—and, moreover, strongly felt they had done it on their own—they not only would not deal with women’s issues such as the blossoming feminist movement but shied from it. You can scan the writings of the relatively few female newspaper columnists of the early 1970s, when the women’s movement was at its most rambunctious and persuasive, and find almost no mention of it.

  This was not Nora. In fact, at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, she crossed the line from journalist-observer to activist. To the befuddlement of many (male) observers, the women’s movement played an important and contentious role at the convention. The Democratic Party’s rules had been changed to require the participation of women, and challenges were being brought to the seating of delegations that had too few women. The party’s eventual nominee, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, was not only an ally of the women’s movement, but it was under his aegis that the party’s rules had been changed.