She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  I was mystified. New York’s surrogates were powerful judicial officials and occasionally the subject of vicious patronage battles. This was the era of weird weddings with exotic religious ceremonies, but the surrogates were usually Democratic Party stalwarts, chosen for fidelity to the organization and not for their anthropological creativity. As if to drive the point home, the surrogate’s chambers were a baronial, high-domed affair with massive pieces of furniture, including a long, heavy table suitable for a medieval feast. It was covered by a suitably heavy tapestry.

  Midonick himself, however, was a reformer. He greeted us warmly and said to Carl, “I knew your mother.” Carl shot me a wink.

  Midonick stood at one end of the room and readied himself for the ceremony. Normally, he said, he did the standard marriage ceremony, but this day—this very special day—he would like to try something different. Something from an Indian tribe. I think he mentioned the Navahos.

  Oh my God, Nora’s right, I thought. I was stunned. How did she know? How could she have known? Were we now going to be asked to do a rain dance?

  Instantly, Nora objected. The conventional ceremony would be fine with her, she said sternly. Midonick hesitated and then acquiesced. He reluctantly handed his clerk the printed material he had been holding and, after a moment, began the familiar marriage vows. When he had finished, he nodded to the clerk, and the young man moved to the heavy table and threw back the tapestry. Underneath were about a dozen copies of All the President’s Men, Carl and Bob’s book about their Watergate reporting. Midonick wanted them autographed. The new bride cooled her heels as Carl and Bob dutifully did what was asked of them. We soon piled back into the limo and headed to a small reception in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel.

  It was a Nora day from beginning to end—from the pickup at Group to the kibosh on the nontraditional Navaho ceremony and then, in the limo heading uptown, a display of her need to control . . . or panic. The limo driver had headed uptown on Third Avenue. Nora thought he should have chosen the FDR Drive. Third Avenue had lights. The FDR did not. Third Avenue had a twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. The FDR’s forty or maybe fifty.

  She erupted. She berated the driver for choosing the wrong route. He mumbled some sort of explanation, maybe something about traffic on the FDR—I don’t know. Whatever it was, Nora was not placated. She homed in on the driver, reprimanding him almost all the way up Third. (See, the FDR would have been quicker.) Woodward, who had served in the navy and just helped bring down the government, was awed.

  * * *

  Nora and Carl, Carl and Nora. They had gotten married in the face of second thoughts. Nora had been warned about Carl. He was a prowler, and Nora, who had already been betrayed by men (and with women she considered friends), was in over her head. They had broken up once, reconciled at Carl’s pleading, and now—her cynicism be damned—she was going where her friends had told her she should not. Like the limo driver, she was taking the wrong route.

  In the New York Times account of the wedding, Carl was the headline: BERNSTEIN, CO-AUTHOR OF NIXON BOOKS, WEDS. The item mentioned that the couple had met in December 1973 and that “Mr. Bernstein would resume his book promotion tour with Mr. Woodward.” It ended ominously with a quote from Nora: “Nobody’s moving to the other person’s town.”

  Dinner with Betty, Harold, and the Pope If He’s in Town.

  * * *

  Nora did not so much move to Washington as accept what diplomats call a posting. She was only in D.C. temporarily, a Washingtonian by virtue of having been assigned there. She talked about the place as if it were a bit third worldish. It lacked not only world-class restaurants but good physicians as well, the latter being only slightly more essential than the former. When she became pregnant with Jacob, born in 1978, she saw New York doctors, pronouncing them the best, and she gave no consideration at all to delivering her child in Washington, where countless babies had been born over the years—among them John F. Kennedy, Jr., my own son, and Carl himself—but insisted on New York. When Nora talked about the Washington medical establishment, one could conjure up a Civil War–era ward, mosquito netting over the beds and bearded orderlies cleansing wounds with whiskey. Nora’s child would be born in New York, and that was that.

  As with all of Nora’s pronouncements, I accepted this one both as revealed truth and with a grain of salt. She did not wonder about the state of medicine in Washington, ask around about doctors, or in other ways consult. She simply said that the town was inadequate and implied that giving birth there would risk the life of her baby not to mention herself. I had to wonder if she was on to something. Her certainty was compelling. She brooked no contradiction. When the time came, she went off to New York.

  * * *

  Nora’s life after marrying Carl could be summed up in a single screenplay. It would be called The Eastern Shuttle, and it would be about a couple who commuted between New York and Washington, going back and forth on the shuttle service maintained by the now-defunct Eastern Airlines. Nora and Carl wrote most of it and, when they got stymied, called me as sort of “play doctor.” We fixed the screenplay but not the underlying problem. In retrospect, the marriage was in trouble.

  It would be some time, however, before things would go haywire. In the meantime, Nora adjusted to the loss of New York by simply bringing New York down to Washington. Her dinner parties became half Oval Office and half Round Table.

  Carl accommodated that. He poured some of his Watergate riches into a dowager of a four-bedroom apartment located in a grand old Washington institution called the Ontario. The cooperative was built in 1903, high on a hill and overlooking the National Zoo. (The nighttime roaring of the lions was an unadvertised feature.) Carl immediately gutted the place, tearing down walls, rearranging the layout, bringing in more sun and creating a dazzling all-white apartment.

  He festooned the apartment with colorful quilts and American antiques, for which he had an unerring eye. It was a style not yet so fashionable, and it worked perfectly with the surgical austerity of the construction. Fresh flowers arrived daily, or nearly so, and a service periodically polished the new copper pans. Music from an intricate concoction of woofers, subwoofers, amplifiers, and preamplifiers suffused the place. I used to call the rig Ol’ Sparky after the Sing Sing electric chair which dimmed the prison’s lights when the switch was thrown. I feared Carl’s elaborate stereo would do the same to the neighborhood.

  What Carl knew about music, Nora knew about entertaining. She was already a foodie, but beyond that, she had an absolutely amazing Rolodex. I did not know back then of the hostessing confidence that had so awed Dan Greenburg. All I knew was that when Nora and Carl threw a dinner party, it was unlike any other in Washington. Sure, the odd politician or Georgetown fixture would show up, but so would someone from New York or Hollywood. One night, Harold Pinter and his wife, Antonia Fraser, stormed out. Pinter, the English playwright, and Fraser, the historian, had been offended when someone steered the conversation to the bizarre sexual antics of a mutual friend. They bolted the apartment just as I was arriving.

  In 1978 Lauren Bacall published a memoir, Lauren Bacall by Myself. I loved the idea of Bacall, and I used the book as an excuse to vent my awe of her in my Washington Post column. To my surprise, a man claiming to be Bacall’s father called the day the column appeared. He disputed much that Bacall had written about him, and I, properly skeptical, questioned his credentials. Come on out and see me, he said. He lived in an apartment house in the Washington suburbs. We would meet in the lobby.

  “How will I recognize you?” I asked.

  “You won’t have any trouble,” he responded—and indeed I didn’t. In the lobby stood Lauren Bacall as a man. He had her long face and brooding eyes.

  My next column gave his side of the family story. He had not left his wife, but she him. He was not a bad father, but a good one. And so on. The night of the second column I went to Carl and Nora’s for dinner. Before I could get into the building, someone stoppe
d me in the driveway with a warning: Bacall was there. She was going to gut me.

  Washington dinner parties had certain rules. One of them was to avoid confrontations—say what you will about someone during the day, but at night hatchets are buried as canapés are eaten. Only once was I accosted on a buffet line and asked to account for something I had written. It was a shocking but refreshing breach of the rules. (Someone cared.)

  I did not expect Bacall to play by Washington rules. She was a formidable woman and stories about her volcanic temper were legion. I hesitated about going inside, but I could not pass up the chance of seeing her in person. I circled inside the apartment, keeping away from Bacall. Finally, I took a seat and was munching something when she abruptly plopped down beside me. Her timing was stage perfect. She glared at me, then broke into a smile, took my hand, and said, “It’s all right.”

  * * *

  Nora was a Washington anomaly. She was a woman who was not, primarily, “the wife of” whomever she had long ago married, who had since worked his way to Washington—elected, appointed, or just showing up. She had crackling wit, a New Yorky cynicism, a knowledge of theater and movies and literature—almost anything, actually. She did not know the nickname of the undersecretary of whatever, but everyone else knew that. In a town of dormant women, a city where the seat to the man’s left or right was sure to be occupied by some belligerently unhappy woman, someone who might just announce herself by saying, “I do nothing,” Nora was a woman who not only did something but could talk about it. She was always on the hunt for the universal—the stuff that could make a column in Esquire, something the meaning of which would not evaporate in a news cycle.

  Little wonder then that the few women like her in Washington gravitated to her. Foremost among them was Sally Quinn, who had been hired for the Washington Post’s new Style section and overnight, or so it seemed, became the journalistic enfant terrible of Washington society—or, to their regret, those deluded souls who somehow thought they should be included in Washington society. (Sally soon set them right.)

  Quinn had gone off to New York to become the co-anchor for the troubled CBS Morning News. It was a spot that Nora had sought for herself, but, as a favor to literature and cinema, CBS had rejected her. Quinn, a requisite blonde but never a perky morning person, got the job and, soon, the approbation. She was vilified and, like almost everyone before—and after—her at CBS, failed. Sally returned to Washington and the Post and in 1978 married the paper’s editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee.

  Quinn and Bradlee personified “power couple.” Betty Ford and then Rosalynn Carter got the title of first lady, but it was only titular. Washington’s actual first lady was Sally Quinn. As the daughter of a three-star general, she not only reveled in the role but came to it naturally. She and Ben eventually moved into an appropriately grand eighteenth-century mansion in Georgetown, where she entertained in a manner befitting the house and its provenance (it had once belonged to Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln), but at the time Sally and Nora became close friends, the Bradlees had been living more modestly, in a nineteenth-century town house in the slightly raffish Dupont Circle area.

  Nora and Sally had much in common. They were both writers, of course—although Sally had not been one when the clearly smitten Bradlee had hired her at the Post. (“Well, no one’s perfect,” the Post’s editorial page editor, Philip L. Geyelin, wryly commented.) Nora and Sally were also both gutsy. Each came from her own kind of royalty—Hollywood or military—and they both could take a punch. Years before Nora would write Heartburn, Sally got up off the canvas to write “We’re Going to Make You a Star,” her account of her humiliation at the hands of CBS and Clay Felker’s New York magazine.

  But before Nora and Sally would become friends, they would become rivals. They had known each other, of course, crossing paths in New York and the Hamptons, noticing each other, saying the polite hello while doing a size-up, and then in 1973, a CBS-TV executive named Sandy Sokolow asked Nora if she would be interested in being the female host of the network’s incessantly revamped morning show. The male anchor would be Hughes Rudd, an appealingly crotchety non-morning type, and his female partner was yet to be chosen. Was Nora interested?

  Yes. No. Yes and no. She was already an established writer and she had done some TV—not very well, she thought—and she knew that success on TV would mean failure: It would hurt her writing and kill her romantic life and she didn’t much respect the medium, at least what she saw on it. Yet, could she say no? The money. The fame. The limo. Probably a clothing allowance.

  Who else was in the running? she asked.

  Sally Quinn, she was told.

  “There is no way for me . . . to convey the exact pain I felt at that moment,” Nora later wrote in New York magazine. She not only immediately knew that she had lost but that she had lost for the same reason she had lost so many other times in her life: She was not a blonde. She was not a looker. Here it was once again, the breast thing—or, to be more precise, a variation thereof. It wasn’t that Sally was some buxom blonde, it was that she was definitely a blonde. She was pretty, sexy, and, worse yet, she knew it and used it to her advantage. She had even said so. At the very same journalism conference where Nora and I had had our brief encounter, Sally revealed how she got her interview subjects to open up. “Being blonde doesn’t hurt.”

  This was at a panel on women in journalism. This was said during the high age of orthodox feminism. This was said at a time when saying such things—never mind their truth—was forbidden. The audience was shocked. Nora was furious and instantly she said so. In fact, she said so to one of Sally’s colleagues at the Washington Post who, seeing her duty, printed it.

  In due course, which was to happen very quickly, Nora and Sally became fast friends. What Nora did not know at the time was that she was about to move to Washington as Mrs. Carl Bernstein. Upon rumination, however, she did come to realize what had so irritated her. It was not, exactly, Sally’s veering from feminist orthodoxy and it was not even losing the CBS job, it was the unavoidable truth.

  “I realized that what had gotten me was that Sally Quinn was right. Her way worked. My way didn’t.”

  Well, of course it did. Her way did not work when it came to getting the CBS job, but it did at so much else. And one of the things it worked at was becoming the poster girl, the anti-pinup, for the ordinary-looking woman. It was to some extent a pose—although Nora was sincere in her insecurity—but it did make her tribune of the ordinary, the woman who spoke for all women who resented the other women who got the guys. She spoke for them and she spoke with such humor and keen observation that it ultimately propelled her to the sort of success that certainly would have eluded her had CBS chosen her for the morning show anchor. Nora could be an essayist, a screenwriter, a playwright, a blogger, a columnist, and a film director, but she could not be—in the fullest sense of the word—a blonde.

  Two other women of importance showed up at Nora and Carl’s—Katharine Graham and Meg Greenfield. The former was the publisher-owner of the Washington Post. The latter was the paper’s editorial page editor after Geyelin. Graham was routinely called the most powerful woman in Washington, which was part truth, part cliché since her power was severely limited by tradition; the publisher did not interfere with the news department. Meg, in contrast, wielded real, visible power. She wrote or approved the Post’s editorials and she chose the paper’s op-ed columnists. Underneath her avuncular façade was a remorseless killer.

  Graham and Greenfield were worldly women. Graham, an heir to a sizable fortune, had done her radical days in San Francisco, and Greenfield had come down from New York trailing an oft-mentioned but entirely vague love affair. I was thoroughly terrified of both women and perplexed by the rules, if there were any. What could I say? What should I say? Could I use the word “fuck”? If I did, it was probably after Katharine did.

  Nora knew both women as “girls.” I do not mean to either trivialize or patronize. These we
re tough, talented women. But whereas I knew Katharine and Meg as bosses and powerful Washington figures, Nora knew them as women as well. They knew the sexism of men. They knew the sexism of men who did not think of themselves as sexist. They felt the dank touch of the patronizing compliment, the feeling of being the rare or only woman in the room. They had that in common and they exchanged experiences with a knowing glance—as Jews once did and blacks still do.

  Washington hardly humbled Nora. She brought her New York ways with her. She demanded acknowledgment at the restaurants where, through frequent patronage, she thought she had earned recognition. For instance, we were all regulars at the Palm, a New York steak house that had opened a D.C. branch. We had planned to celebrate one of my birthdays there. A cake had been ordered, but when I called on the appointed night, I was told that no table was available. The restaurant conceded that I had ordered a cake, but I had failed to book a table.

  I was prepared to show up and wait, but Nora insisted that if anyone should wait it ought to be someone who was not a regular. Call them back, she softly ordered. I called.

  “No can do,” Tommy, the maître d’, said.

  “Tell them we’re going to eat somewhere else, but you’ll stop by to pick up the cake,” Nora told me to say.

  I said it.

  A bit later, I showed up with my game face on and asked for the cake. The maître d’ handed it to me. “You know where you can put it,” he said.