She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  It was years before I returned to the Palm.

  * * *

  Someone called a meeting—I don’t know who. It was called to discuss whether Bob and Carl should permit their book All the President’s Men to be made into a movie. The idea for a movie had come from Robert Redford, who was the very embodiment of the cliché “not just a pretty face.” Redford did have the prettiest of faces, but it masked a restless intellect and a compulsion to make very good, as opposed to merely popular, motion pictures. By the time he approached Woodward, he had made nearly twenty feature films, starred in most of them, and had been directed by some of Hollywood’s best—Arthur Penn, Sydney Pollack, George Roy Hill, and, significantly, Alan J. Pakula.

  The meeting was convened in Carl’s apartment to consider a matter of grave importance: Would Carl and Bob be selling out? The concern seems laughable now, but it was keenly felt at the time. Would Redford and Pakula cheapen the story? Would the Washington Post suffer? How about journalism in general? After all, Carl and Bob were constantly being scrutinized for the least ethical or moral lapse: Was Bob really in the CIA? Was Carl a commie, as his parents were rumored to be?

  Seymour Hersh was at the meeting. I found that odd because Hersh, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. Army troops at My Lai, was then with the New York Times and ostensibly a competitor. But here again relationships were intertwined. Hersh had been represented by David Obst, whose Dispatch News Service had syndicated the story of the massacre. Obst was also Carl and Bob’s agent—and would become mine as well. (He would later marry Lynda Rosen, who as Lynda Obst would become a Hollywood producer, Sleepless in Seattle being one of her movies.) Above all, Hersh often played tennis with Woodward. Bob knew he didn’t cheat.

  Hersh questioned Redford’s offer. Nora, on the other hand, was all for it. It seemed only natural to her that a book would become a movie, and it was likewise natural that in the process some facts would be changed. A book was a book. A movie was a movie. The worst thing a director could do was film the book.

  Nora’s voice was the one of authority. But it was also oddly the voice of a Hollywood where fidelity to the truth was not as valued as a good story. This was the wrong approach as far as meticulous Washington journalists were concerned. When it came to moviemaking, who could argue with Nora? It turned out that Pauline Kael could. She was the film critic for the New Yorker, the goddess of the cineaste, and in the middle of the meeting Woodward casually dropped her name. I was dumbfounded. Pauline Kael! Woodward knew the great Pauline Kael! I said nothing, but after the meetings was adjourned, I went over to Bob and asked how he knew Pauline Kael and when he had met her. He didn’t know her, he replied. He had called her earlier that day. I understood. Carl had his Nora. Woodward needed one, too.

  The movie went ahead. Redford, who would play Woodward, and Dustin Hoffman, who would play Carl, descended on the newsroom of the Washington Post. Redford and Pakula were sticklers for accuracy—they even had the newsroom’s trash scooped up and shipped to the Hollywood set. The two actors came to visit me, sometimes sitting in my office, whiling away the time. Hoffman was just going through the motions. He was not going to imitate Carl. He was not going to study how to be a reporter. He was going to do something else, he confided to me. “It’s called acting.”

  All the President’s Men premiered in Washington, at the Kennedy Center no less. Redford and Hoffman were in attendance, most of the Post’s top editors and, as I recall, Nora, although she was not mentioned in the next day’s newspaper. Woodward pronounced himself pleased with the outcome since the film, he said, “is about reporting—the procedures and not the personalities.” Whatever it was, it was a triumph. It was nominated for the Academy Award in eight categories and won in four (including Art Direction, for the meticulous re-creation of the newsroom). William Goldman got one for his screenplay and Jason Robards won Best Supporting Actor for his role as Ben Bradlee. The film made plenty of money, turned journalists into latter-day cinematic cowboys, and reaffirmed Bradlee as a folk hero. The Washington Post itself became fabled. All in all, it was a glorious time to be at the Post and in Washington.

  Washington, however, is where I lived, not where I worked. By day, I got into the car and drove to Annapolis, Maryland, where I covered the State House—the governor’s office and the legislature. Maryland was a small state, but it was capable of huge scandals—two governors back-to-back were convicted of corruption. The first was Spiro Agnew, who served as Richard Nixon’s vice president until he was forced to resign and plead no contest to corruption charges. The second was Marvin Mandel, whose conviction was later overturned on appeal—but not before he had gone to prison. For a journalist, Maryland was a feast.

  Along with my Washington Post colleague Jules Witcover I did a book on the Agnew affair. As unprecedented as it was for a vice president to be proven corrupt and have to resign, the scandal soon got overwhelmed by Watergate. It became a footnote, sinking to the bottom of the page, where it has remained ever since. A vice president is a pretty big fish, but a president is a whale.

  I came back from book leave and was peremptorily assigned to the city desk. I was apparently deemed in need of humility, and so a trash fire in an apartment house was my first assignment. I soon became bored, incapable of doing just any story. A torpor set in. My production was meager; my attitude was lousy. Nora noticed. She took me to lunch.

  The restaurant was called the Big Cheese, located on M Street, N.W., in Georgetown. We sat toward the back, and I wondered what the agenda was—why I had been summoned for lunch. It was not all that rare that I joined Nora for lunch, but dinner with Carl and my wife was our usual fare.

  Nora came to the point. I had to become a columnist. She had had her eye on me, it seemed, and discovered that I was no good at taking orders and not much good, either, as a reporter. Once I saw the outline of whatever story I was working on, my enthusiasm flagged. Then I wanted to write, since writing was fun and a way of expressing myself.

  Nora’s suggestion was both intriguing and preposterous. I had always wanted to be a columnist—my boyhood heroes were Nora’s old colleagues at the New York Post, particularly Murray Kempton—but, still, I had no idea how to make this happen. Nora, though, not only knew that it could happen, but that it should happen. She enveloped me in her confidence. She even picked up the check.

  Sometime later, I asked Bradlee to lunch. I was going to quit the Post and accept a job with Cox Newspapers covering the White House. But before I could quit, Bradlee surprised me by offering to try me out as a columnist. Did Nora have anything to do with it? I don’t think so, but whether she got to Bradlee is almost immaterial. What matters more is that she got to me. She made me think of myself as a columnist.

  Bradlee’s offer came with a condition: Submit five sample columns. He would look them over and then decide whether I had what it takes to be a columnist. But I needed the adrenaline of a deadline and, besides, Nora had already decided I was a columnist, so rather than submit five columns to Bradlee, I submitted one to the city editor. I’m the new local columnist, I told him. You can check with Bradlee.

  The next day, my column appeared in the paper.

  From there on in, I had the best editor in the world working with me. Nora would call with suggestions. She would call with hints, tips, and choice pieces of editing wisdom. She taught me how to end the column, often by circling back to the beginning, closing the circle. She taught me that a column was a bit like a play or a short story. It had to have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. A writer had to respect and honor the reader’s expectations. Just as Chekhov said, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it,” so the columnist must not raise an issue without making a point.

  Not long after I began writing my column, in 1976, it was revealed that Marvin Mandel, the governor of Maryland, had borrowed $54,000 so he could divorce his wife and marry his mistress. That was enough in it
self to make a column, but in this case the devil was surely in the details. Mandel had borrowed the money not from a bank or even a political crony but from a Catholic religious order called the Pallottines, who were headquartered in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood.

  Marvin Mandel was Jewish. His mistress was Catholic. When he remarried, his new wife converted to Judaism.

  I hurried to Baltimore. I scurried around Little Italy, which I knew from my days covering Maryland politics. I talked to everyone I could, people on the street, women coming out of St. Leo’s Roman Catholic Church, and even the parish pastor, Nicholas D. Rinaldi, a Pallottine priest. I returned to Washington with a notebook bursting with gorgeous quotes. And then I wrote and rewrote—polished and polished until the column glistened with detail and facts and the utter absurdity of it all. My editors loved it. They actually said so, which they almost never did.

  When Nora called the next day, I was expecting even more praise. But, no, she was critical. What had wowed my Post editors was my reporting, the accretion of detail. They liked that. Nora did, too—up to a point. But then I had not turned the corner, brought the column home: said what it all meant. What was the point? What was the point? My column, Nora said, had no point. It was a little feature story. It was not a column. My editors were wrong. Nora was right. That, too, was the point.

  Nora Wishes Naples a Ba Fungu

  * * *

  We flew into Rome on some sort of charter flight which landed at the secondary airport, Ciampino. How we got on that charter is something I cannot recall, except that it must have been Nora’s doing. Everything about that trip to Italy was Nora’s doing since Nora either knew the best way to go or the best place to be. Besides, she had mentioned our forthcoming trip to Katharine Graham, who gleefully said she had to tell her friend Johnny that we were coming to Italy. At that moment, I had no idea she was referring to Gianni Agnelli, the chairman of Fiat and without a doubt the most important and influential man in Italy. Johnny would take care of us, Katharine Graham said.

  Johnny was on the spot. Almost wherever we went—Rome, Venice, the Amalfi Coast—a telegram was waiting at our hotel from Johnny. A duly impressed hotel manager would intone that Signor Agnelli—our Johnny—was unable to meet us for dinner or lunch that day but surely we could meet another day. With that, our reserved room was instantly upgraded at no charge and we were properly installed as friends of the most important man in Italy.

  At one stop, our friend Johnny suggested by wire that he send his helicopter to fetch us for lunch. He was on his yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean, but he’d make sure we’d be back by dinner. Before I had a chance to say yes—yes, of course, the yacht, beautiful women, a smattering of dyspeptic royalty, a movie star or two, possibly even Cary Grant—Nora put her foot down. No. Who would want to do that? We were in Italy to see Italy, not to schmooze with decadent Euro trash.

  In Rome, we hired a car for the drive down to the Amalfi Coast and the Hotel Palumbo in Ravello. I drove, my wife Barbara sat next to me, and Nora and Carl took the back. Nora chose to consult her many guidebooks rather than look at the steep drop into the Mediterranean. The serpentine road hugged the cliff, making for an exhausting and tense ride, but I was then the owner back in Washington of a BMW 2002 with a stick shift, and so I rather enjoyed the opportunity to downshift and take the turns in just the proper gear. Nora, however, had scant appreciation for my driving skills, and with the fate of the hapless New York limo driver in mind, I slowed the pace. Nora was a horrible backseat driver. It wasn’t that she always knew the best route. It was that she was always fearful.

  Traveling with Nora was a bit like joining an organized tour. The only thing she lacked was one of those brightly colored umbrellas that tour guides hold up. She had the requisite guidebooks, which she occasionally consulted but which she had mostly committed to memory. But she also had the many suggestions of her many friends who were experienced travelers and foodies. They knew the best hotels and the best restaurants, and so then did she. We went where we were told.

  In Venice, Nora and Carl’s contact person was a woman named Olive Behrendt. She was the widow of George W. Behrendt, a Los Angeles insurance tycoon who had done, as they say, quite well in the business. Olive was a tall woman, well dressed and possessed of a bouncy charm, who had been an opera singer in her youth and was then on the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. She lived part of the year in Venice, where, as she told it, she had become the city’s first and maybe only woman licensed to pilot a powerboat. As Nora pointed out, she was also the only person capable of saying “Zubin” twice in one sentence. Referring to her friend, the Philharmonic’s musical director, Zubin Mehta, she would say, “So I told Zubin, Zubin . . .” Once Nora said that, we all started to count Zubins.

  Behrendt was a real find. She was a delightfully knowledgeable guide, ferrying us around Venice in her sleek powerboat and slipping lira notes of undermined denomination into the hands of countless expectant Venetians. The money seemed to come out of her sleeve like fish flapping down a sluice.

  I had been to Venice once before with my wife, coming in on a vaporetto, the boat that serves as a bus. The vaporetto had been crowded, and while open on the sides, it had a sloping roof that hindered getting a good view. This time, though, we had hired a private motor launch. It made all the difference.

  Our boat took a route that the vaporetto did not. It slid into a narrow canal and then, clearing its throat, varoomed toward the heart of the city, where it made a wide, sweeping turn into the Grand Canal. I had a difficult choice to make: either look at Carl’s face and watch it become engorged with delight or see Venice on a sparkling day. There is no forgetting seeing Venice for the first time. There is no forgetting Carl seeing it for the first time, either.

  In Rome, we plunged into Italian cuisine—or rather cuisines. At a place off the Via Veneto, we discovered spaghetti alla checca, a gorgeous, summery dish which in Heartburn, Nora described as “hot pasta with a cold tomato and basil sauce.”

  In the book (and the movie) Barbara and I are Julie and Arthur Siegel. In the book, we spend quite a bit of time delving into pesto. It was 1977 and “everyone was eating pesto. As Arthur Siegel said one day: ‘Pesto is the quiche of the seventies.’ ” I have no idea if I said that or not, but I like the line and I did develop an addiction to pesto. Up until that trip, though, food was just something I ate, usually—but not necessarily—when I was hungry. I came from a family where absolutely no one looked forward to a meal as a sensuous—as opposed to necessary—experience. We ate because it was time to eat.

  Italy and Nora—Nora and Italy—changed all that. Food became not something you ate but something you did. The day was arranged around our meals, and the meals themselves were prolonged affairs in which we tasted just about everything interesting a particular restaurant had to offer. Sometimes, too, Nora would cadge a recipe, as she did for the acclaimed spaghetti alla checca, modified in Heartburn as linguini. It’s a happy dish, bursting with the Italian countryside (tomatoes, olive oil, and basil), and it became my go-to recipe, so simple to prepare that even I could manage.

  Some days it seemed we did nothing but eat. We consumed Italy, gulping it down restaurant by restaurant. Some we went to twice—the little place with the outdoor tables in the old Ghetto—great food, but really no Jews—and the spaghetti alla checca joint a block off the Via Veneto, which, when we went back years later, had inexplicably dropped it off the menu—and refused to make it. We ate, of course, at Dal Bolognese, the celebrity spot, to see who we could see, which, as I remember, was absolutely no one. (I once saw Audrey Hepburn there.)

  Italy was an introduction to the supreme importance of food in Nora’s life. Many years later, as if I was still digesting what we had eaten in Rome, we drove from L.A. to the Napa Valley and went almost immediately to Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, the restaurant that’s occasionally called the best in the world and always called among the best in the world. Nora h
ad secured the reservation, and while the French Laundry’s lunch is renowned for its many courses, it soon became clear that the additional ones had been added on account of her.

  The food kept coming. Delight turned to duty, a trudge through pastries and meats, fish and vegetables, all of it too enticing and delicious to reject. It was impossible to say no. Everything was extraordinary. Besides, Thomas Keller would be hurt. He was in the kitchen. We had met him. We had to keep eating. For the experience of it all. For Tom. For the sake of afterward—a good anecdote.

  Normally, the restaurant served a nine-course tasting menu. That day I think I counted seventeen. (I also had a lot of bread.) It was Italy all over again—food consuming us instead of the usual way around. Satiation turned to discomfort and discomfort to mild agony. We were paradigms of the bourgeois barbarian, gourmands rather than gourmets—yes, we were aware of that.

  Yet Nora was always the very model of moderation. She ate everything but sparingly and never drank to excess, either. No matter what came at us, an assembly line of the succulent, Nora was able to parse, taste every ingredient, and declaim on the cooking method. She loved the food not because reservations were nearly impossible to get or because the place had more stars than Patton’s parade uniform, but because it was sooo good.

  Italy was my first trip with Nora. Later came Spain and England and the Caribbean and of course the Mediterranean on David Geffen’s divine dreadnought, a one-boat flotilla of luxury. Later, too, came Paris and back to Italy several times more and California and Vegas, more Nick’s town than hers, and then Paris once or twice more. But Italy is where our splendid romance blossomed. Nora put it best in Heartburn.

  “Arthur and Julie and Mark and Rachel. The Siegels and the Feldmans,” Nora wrote. In real life, they were the Cohens and the Bernsteins, four former or current newspaper people, all of us writers—close, so very close. “It’s not just that we were best friends—we dated each other. We went steady. That’s one of the things that happens when you become a couple: You date other couples. We saw each other every Saturday night and every Sunday night, and we have a standing engagement for New Year’s Eve.”