Nora saw no action—no bang-bang in the TV locution of that era—but neither did any of the other American journalists. (Only Israeli reporters got to go to the front.) But she caught the machismo—the ersatz Hemingway writing, the staccato burst of quick, tight sentences, that many male correspondents were wont to adopt. She understood their need to prove themselves both to their readers (and editors) but especially to themselves. “Working as a war correspondent is almost the only classic masculine endeavor left that provides physical danger and personal risk without public disapproval,” she wrote.
What’s remarkable about Nora’s reportage is the absolute sureness with which she wrote. Her observations are keen and not in the least buried in layers of irrelevant data. Here she was, the inexperienced girl reporter for a magazine best known for snarky writing and bargain hunting, and she says straight out what she thinks. And what she thinks is tough, sinewy, critical and condemnatory. She cannot abide what she considers Israeli racism, and its warrior culture repels her. She is a product of the Vietnam War era—a war, she writes, “which if it accomplished anything at all, managed to give war a thoroughly bad name. In any case, that is true for me.”
Understand: Israel had been sucker punched. On October 6, 1973, the armies of Syria and Egypt invaded and for a while did very well indeed. The Egyptians even managed to cross the Suez Canal and punch deep into the Sinai Peninsula. For a time, Israel was on the ropes. The Soviet Union was backing the Arab states. The good guys were on one side and the bad guys on the other, and there was no doubt which was which. That was especially the case in New York City, which was more Jewish than even Tel Aviv, and yet Nora never wrote down to her presumed audience and instead must have brought many of them up short.
* * *
When Nora worked at the New York Post, she had a nickname. It was BeeBee Fenstermaker, taken from the play The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker by William Snyder, which had opened in the Village in 1962. It was about a young woman who graduates from college and comes to New York where she takes an apartment to become a writer. Only in the broadest sense did the description fit Nora. BeeBee had not come from California but from the South. She did not go into journalism, but attempted to write a novel. Maybe more to the point, BeeBee was not Jewish—not that it mattered any to the wise guys at the Post. Fenstermaker sounded Jewish, and Nora, no doubt about it, looked the part.
But Nora’s Jewishness was, literally, skin deep. She had come from a family that was orthodox only in its atheism. Her sister Hallie characterized their parents as “culinary Jews” only. Their religious devotion was limited to visits to the deli for lox, bagels, and such.
The Ephrons celebrated Christmas with gifts and the requisite Christmas tree. In the 1940s, they probably had the common enough desire to distinguish themselves from the Jews of the ugly stereotype—newly rich, loud, garish, tasteless—so much so that their own daughter Hallie considered them to be borderline anti-Semites. They did not hate Jews; they just didn’t want to be any.
Nora had the Pale of Settlement plastered on her face. She simply looked Jewish, although political correctness insists there is no such thing. She owned up to it, never pretending to be anything other than the product of a Jewish household and reveling in the culture. She was not content, for instance, to merely yank my son’s bar mitzvah from a sedate hotel to a New York–style restaurant, we also had to engage a klezmer band, and at the proper time Nora shouted for a hora to begin. Soon after, Nora plopped my son in a chair and had it hoisted into the air—the traditional airborne seat of honor. High above the dancers, Alex bobbed back and forth, a trifle terrified (as was his father), until Nora decided it was time to resume the real business of the day—eating. She had the makings of a tummler, the Yiddish term once applied to the recreation directors at Catskill resorts.
* * *
Nora’s writings are replete with mentions of her Jewishness and that of others. She exhibited some disdain for Bonnie Sloan, the other Wellesley girl from Beverly Hills. The name Sloan itself came in for some contempt, and Bonnie’s affectations—including her adopted English accent—were not merely reported as social climbing but as an effort to pass as a gentile. Nora did not approve.
It was at Wellesley, in fact, that Nora was compelled to identify with her Jewish classmates. The school had sent her a form to be used for student housing, and it asked her religion. Nora did not respond, and so the school wrote her back: “Please, what are you?” She responded “atheist,” but by way of acquiescence said she had been born a Jew. (Surely, the school knew that.)
As she and Lynn Sherr discovered when they looked into the matter as reporters for the Wellesley News, the college made sure that roommates had at least one thing in common: religion. Protestants were paired with Protestants, Catholics with Catholics, Jews with Jews, and atheists, presumably, with someone of their ancestral religion. The Wellesley News broke the story that everyone already knew—and the policy was changed.
Nora may not have been much of a Jew, but she was proud of her heritage and on the alert always for the errant anti-Semitic remark. She found it once in something William F. Buckley, Jr., had written. Buckley, the ultra-urbane founder of the National Review magazine and an important intellectual mentor to Ronald Reagan, had in fact largely purged American conservatism of its fusty anti-Semitism. Buckley had the look and the manner of a sniffy Jew hater, but not the convictions of one. Still, Nora, reviewing his book Overdrive, for the New York Times, found it “appalling that Mr. Buckley should mention Shylock when discussing the National Review’s landlord.” What she meant by “appalling” was anti-Semitic—we had discussed the matter—but more interesting to me than Buckley’s klutzy insensitivity was Nora’s sensitivity.
* * *
In her New York magazine articles from Israel, Nora does all the expected things—the tough things. She visits the burn ward of a military hospital, which is tough, tough work—hard to read, harder still to have seen. “There was room after room of soldiers wounded in tank battles, some using breathing machines because their lungs had been so badly burned, others wrapped from top to bottom in gauze that a yellow iodine compound showed through, others who were in better shape physically but were almost unbearable to see—their faces and limbs alternately raw red and then covered with huge black scabs.”
She ends, as she must, with a visit to the cemetery. Here she notes the stoicism of the Western or Ashkenazic Jews as contrasted with the raw, emotionalism of the Jews who had come from Arab lands, whom she calls “Oriental.” She also notes the difference between young mourners and older ones. The young show little emotion; they are tough Israelis and their fight is a long one. The older ones show no such restraint. “Lama? Lama?”—“Why? Why?”—wails an old woman as she hugs her son’s headstone—and the article, Nora’s last from Israel, might have ended there, because here was a Jewish mother asking the age-old question of Jewish mothers from time immemorial: Why? Why?
But on the way out of the cemetery, Nora runs into an Israeli woman she knows, a lieutenant colonel in the army. “We embraced,” she wrote. “ ‘It is only the beginning,’ she said. The remark seemed cold and hard compared with the reactions of the older people; what was most depressing is that it also seemed to the point.”
* * *
Nora’s Israel coverage—cool to the touch—did not in the least affect her latter-day standing as an adored Jewish celebrity. She did not think of herself as a Jewish writer—she shunned labels—but she nevertheless later became a darling of the Jewish lecture circuit. For Jewish groups, she was a major draw. Middle-aged Jewish women considered her one of their own. Most likely they were unaware of her reports from Israel, or since she was not primarily a political or foreign affairs writer, they considered it an insignificant part of her oeuvre—not that they used the word “oeuvre,” Nora might have added.
But in an interview with the writer Abigail Pogrebin for her book Stars of David, Nora was hardly coy. She was the child
of atheists. Her parents celebrated Christmas, and Nora celebrated it in a big way. In religious terms, she was not in the least Jewish—nor did she know anything much about the religion—but, on occasion, she embraced the label of Jewish. She ended a 2003 New York Times essay about yet another John F. Kennedy tryst—this one with a White House intern—by puckishly wondering why the president never hit on her. (She had been a summer intern in the White House press section.) She ran down the possible reasons—“my permanent wave,” “my wardrobe”—and ended with the astounding, and possibly irrelevant, suggestion that in sex, although in nothing else, Kennedy may have been an anti-Semite.
“Don’t laugh,” she cautions. “Think about it. Think about that long, long list of women JFK slept with. Were any Jewish? I don’t think so.”
* * *
By 1973, I was beginning to know Nora. I might have read her reportage from Israel at the time, but more than forty years later, it reads fresh and new to me. I have no memory of it. If Nora and I ever discussed it, I have no memory of that, either—which is noteworthy. Reporters—writers and such—who have been to war or who have seen its hideous aftermath—“Three Egyptian soldiers lay in the sun, black and swollen . . .”—invariably bring it up. It is a credential, like the storied, soiled trench coat of so many battles and even more bistros.
Nora never mentioned her Israel reporting to me. She did mention being there, and what I take it was a dalliance with a (presumably) dashing British war correspondent, but she never told war stories, as men are wont to do. She did, however, evince a barely concealed antipathy toward Israel. In this she was a typical leftie—many of her friends held the same opinions—but the subject became taboo between us after I began living with a woman who had been born in Israel and whose emotional commitment to the country was passionate. Mona would often bring up Israel in conversation—she could hardly contain herself—and Nora, out of love and fervent consideration, would say nothing. Not that she had once been there. Not that she had covered a piece of the war. Nothing. I was grateful. She may not have loved Israel, but she loved Mona.
An Ailanthus Grows in Brooklyn
* * *
“Marlon Brando’s gay, everybody knows that.”
Nora said that one night in my house in Washington. I can’t remember how Brando’s name came up, but there it was, this startling (at the time) piece of information, so inside, so unknown to the general public, who considered him—fools that they were—a womanizer of great repute. I can remember exactly where I was at the time. In the living room. Standing in front of the sofa and to the right. The remark hit with the force of a dumdum bullet. Marlon Brando’s gay? Who knew?
Everybody, it turned out. Everybody knew. And whether they did or they didn’t, whether it was true or not, was totally beside the point. When Nora said one of these things—and she said them quite often—she did not do so with any sort of tentativeness, with hesitation, with the suggestion that this might be the rawest gossip and possibly wrong, but with a firmness and robust confidence that transformed the gossamer of hearsay into something chiseled into the frieze of a Greek temple. It was beyond dispute. Behold what she knew and behold what you didn’t. You knew some things. She knew everything.
One time she slipped in the Latin name of the tree Betty Smith had used in her best-selling novel, later a movie, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ailanthus. She said it, and then she translated it, “Which is the tree that grows in Brooklyn.” Ailanthus. Who knew? All my life I had been looking at those trees and not only never knew their name but never thought to know it. It had never even occurred to me that they had a name or, for that matter, that there was an actual tree that actually grew in Brooklyn.
Nora knew. She recognized the tree for what it was, assigned it its proper name, and recalled it just at the right moment. I don’t have any idea what we were talking about, but her reference to the tree is as fresh as if I just walked into one.
When Nora did something like that, I usually pretended nonchalance. Ailanthus. No reaction. Let’s move on. The same with Brando. Nothing from me. Of course, Brando. Gay. Very gay. Extremely gay. No one knows. I did not exclaim, What, Marlon Brando’s gay? I was determined not to seem nonplussed, to earn Nora’s respect: Of course. Marlon, gay? Who doesn’t know that? She was Hollywood, after all—a graduate of Beverly Hills High. She was a New York magazine writer and, before that, a reporter for the New York Post.
I had worked a bit in New York journalism myself, as a reporter for United Press International. Reporters knew things back then. They knew what had been withheld from the papers—the sex stuff, the dirty stuff, the potentially libelous stuff in what was a far more dainty age. There was no Internet, no blogging—none of that. Reporters had access to information no one else had. They had exotic phone directories so they could look up someone by the address or the phone number, not only the name. You could walk your fingers up and down the hallways of apartment houses, even the fancy ones on Park or Fifth, and know who lived behind every door. One telephone directory was called the crisscross and you could look up a person by his telephone number as well as her name.
We had files and libraries, ominously called “the morgue,” but best of all we had old-timers who knew everything, forgot nothing, and in stunning rebuke to medical science, had their memories honed by regular snorts. They not only knew the cops, they were like cops themselves and could have been cops had they not gone astray and taken a night school course or two. The cops, of course, knew everything, stuff not even the newspaper people knew.
Scandal itself has since been diluted. Homosexuality is no longer considered outré. Premarital sex is now passé, as are open extramarital affairs. Ingrid Bergman’s affair with the director Roberto Rossellini—they were both married to others at the time—all but had her banned from America. Ed Sullivan would not have her on his popular and influential TV show. Nowadays, she would be a sought-after guest.
I was privy to some of the secrets, but I was working for the Washington Post, covering the Maryland State House, while Nora had been a reporter on a genuine New York tabloid. I knew the skinny on certain Maryland figures, but who cared? Nora, on the other hand, knew New York stuff and, often more sensational, Hollywood stuff. There is absolutely nobody who knew Nora in her early days—from college onward—who did not make an immediate Hollywood association. That’s because she did. She wore the town’s considerable aura like a tiara: She knew the secrets.
The names that dropped from Nora’s lips were never drumrolled—not even preceded with a modest cough. They were simply stated. They were inserted here and there in sentences or used, with appropriate understatement, to clinch an argument. As far as I could tell, Nora never met someone famous for the first time. They had somehow always been present in her life. I can be excused for thinking that Mike Nichols was her childhood friend, that they had met at camp or even earlier, in Berlin, where she had never been—something like that. His name, when rarely invoked, was never accompanied by the unheard rumble of an organ, a trumpet voluntary of a buildup, but by the same matter-of-factness that made Marlon Brando gay and rendered the forlorn tree of Brooklyn a dendrologist’s delight.
* * *
When she got older—after her Washington period, for sure—Nora became protective of her famous friends. I suspect the reason for that was that they really were her friends then and not just marquee names to drop. She rarely mentioned Tom Hanks, for instance—or Steven Spielberg or Steve Martin—and she never gossiped about them. At the same time, she did not venerate them either, did not invoke them or their presumed authority to, say, clinch an argument. They were rarely cited, and in fact, when she and Nick returned from the Geffen boat—a nautical red carpet, as far as I was concerned—she would never offer the names of the other guests. I’d have to ask and then, sometimes, ask again. She was a reformed name dropper.
Mike Nichols was in a singular category. Nora had a special relationship with him that was rarely mentioned. If she went to the Fi
fth Avenue apartment he shared with Diane Sawyer, she never talked about it. If they had lunch, she said nothing. If he warned her off a project under consideration, she was mum. If he did like a script, loved a script, improved a script—whatever—I knew nothing about it. Nora and Mike were celibate lovers.
Back when Nora had first approached Nichols and asked him to dinner, he had not yet reached cult status. That would come at the end of the decade when he directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, more important and creatively, The Graduate, for which he earned an Academy Award. For both Mike and Nora, their meeting was something like love at first sight. Mike “got” Nora the way he had gotten Elaine May. “I instantly recognized a kindred soul,” Nichols said.
They had their own language, I think—a matter of nods and frowns and common cultural references. They knew whose marriage was a sham and who could not act and who had a bad drug problem. They knew the business—the business of movies and the business of theater and, because they were hyperventilating readers, the business of books and magazines. They had words, a torrent of them, but they talked also in shadows and in knowing they were both smart—but neither smarter than the other. They learned from the ricochet.
Nichols had been selected to direct the film version of Joseph Heller’s absurdist antiwar novel Catch-22, and Nora was assigned by the New York Times Magazine to write an article about the making of the movie. In 1969, she and Dan flew down to Mexico to join Nichols for the shoot.
At that point in Nora’s career, Nichols loomed large. He was no mere film person, no Beverly Hills–Brentwood person, but someone who while recognizing the pleasures of Los Angeles preferred the stimulating abrasiveness of New York—just as she did. He was a figure of the theater—just as her parents had been before and after their movie careers. He had been a performer, an actor, an entertainer, and he had about him the air of the worldly German-Jewish intellectual, a man familiar with all the Marxes—Karl and Groucho and the boys—and someone who appreciated depravity. He had come to America from Nazi Germany on a boat that delayed its departure for a broadcast by Hitler.
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