She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  Yes, and Christmas, too. That first one, when Barbara was away and I had stayed in Washington to work on the Agnew book, Nora had cooked a goose dinner. It seemed appropriate to her, Dickens and all that, and so for years afterward we had goose for Christmas and sometimes for New Year’s and sometimes for both. Usually, the goose was bought locally, but one year we got one that Sally Quinn’s father, the formidable General William “Buffalo Bill” Quinn, had downed at his place on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The poor bird was riddled with buckshot. We poor diners had to chew with caution.

  * * *

  At Ravello, we checked into the Hotel Palumbo, perched on a cliff overlooking the sea. The proprietor was waiting for us. On our terraces, he served us his homemade wine and then some ice cream made from local peaches, a taste so vivid it lingers still. Church bells summoned the fishing boats home for the day. Above us, brazen yellow lemons hung heavy from the trees. We were two couples, in love with one another, in love with our lives, and in love with life itself. The collision of sights, sounds, and emotions was too much for me. I cried.

  We ate at the San Pietro in Positano, yet another hotel chiseled out of the cliffs, admired the table setting, flipped over a plate—and were soon off to Vietri, where they made the stuff. On the way, we got lost and hailed a middle-aged woman to ask directions. She was going to Vietri herself and so she climbed into the back of the car, sat on Carl’s lap, and spouted the English she had undoubtedly learned from the erudite soldiers of George S. Patton’s Eighth Army.

  “Fuck you,” she would chirp, and then laugh.

  “Fuck you,” we would cheerfully reply, and then laugh ourselves.

  We found Vietri, bought all we could afford of the colorful plates, espresso cups and saucers, and such, and had it all shipped back to Washington, where it arrived cracked and smashed and pulverized. The crate sat, sad and collapsed, in the middle of a vast warehouse, the pottery bleeding from it. We salvaged what we could and laughed some more.

  Ring My Bell

  * * *

  On March 28, 1979, Margaret Thatcher, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, called for a vote of no confidence in the Labor government of James Callahan. She won by one vote, forcing Callahan to call an election which he subsequently lost, costing his son-in-law, the economics writer Peter Jay, his ambassadorship in Washington. He and his wife Margaret decided this called for a party.

  Margaret, who would become Baroness Jay of Paddington and hold various positions in the House of Lords, was tall and charmingly ungainly, but smart and ironic and energetic and funny. In Washington, I used to see her from time to time—usually at dinner with the flood of British writers who augmented those already stationed in Washington during the glorious Watergate years. They were all lefties of some sort—Margaret’s father, after all, was the socialist PM—although some moved right as they aged and the urge to mount the barricades presumably faded, along with the one for afternoon sex.

  The British ambassador was the titular head of the diplomatic corps. He was not the so-called dean—the longest serving ambassador, who was invariably from some amiable dictatorship (Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Iran, etc.), but he was the most important because Britain was America’s most important ally and because its ambassador entertained a great deal. The embassy itself was a handsome Georgian-style structure on prestigious Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. (Embassy Row), a huge affair built for entertaining and to suggest an English country house.

  Carl and Margaret had met at the home of Fred and Nancy Dutton, both lawyers of great zest and charm who wound up with a single client: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I was a regular at the Duttons, but my only time at the embassy came after Callaghan’s loss, when the embassy’s capacious wine cellar was about to be turned over to the Tories. Defeat was drowned in drink.

  I’m sure Nora was at the party, but I don’t remember anything other than Margaret gleefully taking Carl by the hand and prancing him onto the dance floor. The song was the disco classic “Ring My Bell,” with its suggestive lyric and its insistent beat. It played over and over again that night—

  “You can ring my bell, ring my bell.”

  The song, although immensely popular, was new to me, and when I mentioned it later to Carl, he vehemently denounced it as trash. I was surprised because Carl was always leading the way when it came to music. I had dropped out of popular music while in high school, using my pay as an afternoon counterman in a luncheonette to buy one classical album a week. (Beethoven’s Fifth was my first purchase.) I looked down on popular music, especially rock, for its juvenile lyrics—“I wanna hold your hand”—and its intimidating sexuality.

  But Carl embraced it all. He heard sounds I did not, and sometimes we would sit in his pre-Watergate car, a fatigued red Datsun, and listen to the radio. He thought that the car provided a perfect sound chamber—and it really did—but the sound quality aside, what impressed me was the absolute joy he got out of music—all music. I wanted to believe in a music hierarchy, with classical at the top and contemporary rock ’n’ roll at the bottom. Carl disabused me of that. It was possible to appreciate Beethoven and Little Richard, Schubert and Frankie Valli.

  Carl approached music as he did life. He sampled it all and was innocent in his enthusiasms, and like a child, or a puppy, he would taste almost anything. On vacation with Nora and Barbara and me on the Caribbean island of Martinique, he unthinkingly reached into the floral centerpiece at our lunch table, withdrew a lethal hot pepper, popped it into his mouth, and instantly, rocketed out of his chair, howling. He seized the water pitcher and drained it into his mouth. His mouth was a three-alarmer.

  The man Nora had married was, in a phrase once intended for Hemingway, “a consumer of life.” He grabbed at it all—music, books, experiences, women. He was alive in a tingly sort of way, and surprises popped out him like jacks-in-a-box. At a party once in West Virginia, he sat down at a decrepit upright and played the piano. Who knew? Other times, he played the guitar, once challenging a Tennessee-raised Washington Post colleague, Richard Harwood, to join him in singing “Great Speckled Bird,” a hymn of the Protestant South. Harwood was stunned by the challenge: Bernstein? The Jew? The red-diaper baby?

  C’mon, Carl challenged him, waiting, and then began by himself.

  “What a beautiful thought I am thinking / Concerning a great speckled bird / Remember her name is recorded / On the pages of God’s Holy Word . . .”

  Reluctantly and then with more enthusiasm and delight Harwood dropped his reserve and, providing the requisite twang, joined Carl, whose own accent was an admixture of his parents’ New York and his native Washington.

  This anecdote is really about Nora. It is about the man she married. The marriage came to ruin, a scandal of Krakatoa proportions, and Carl went off looking like a fool. But he was not a fool, and neither was Nora. She had not married wisely, but she had married well. She wrote the history of their marriage, but she did not tell it all. I loved Nora, but I loved Carl also. And I am not a fool, either.

  * * *

  I can only assume that the night at the British embassy had gotten away from Carl. I was there, Barbara was there, Peter was there, and, most important, Nora was there—and Carl’s inamorata, the future Baroness Jay of Paddington, was playing this salacious, suggestive song. Did Nora notice? I don’t know. But I do know that she was a fervid non-dancer, someone who eschewed the dance floor, preferring the sidelines, the anteroom, where the music was distant and she could do with repartee and wit what the dancers were doing with their bodies.

  Nora did not dance and for all her humor about it, she was deeply insecure about her attractiveness, her sex appeal. And here was Margaret, for all her ungainliness, exuding a kind of Old Vic ribaldry and having, for all her lefty credentials, that upper class proprietorship of sex. It was theirs. They had long ago disconnected it from love or marriage because what mattered most of all was consolidating and safeguarding property. Marriage could be just a business pla
n.

  Indeed, at that very moment, Peter Jay was himself carrying on with his children’s nanny, by whom he would have a child. In due course, Peter was chauffeured out to the Washington suburbs, where he met with a psychiatrist associated with the famous St. Elizabeth’s Hospital who had earlier met with both Carl and Margaret. I, too, had sought her counsel—her Patient Zero having been a Washington Post colleague of Carl’s and mine. Nora enlisted her as a character in Heartburn, in which she became “a Guatemalan shrink over in Alexandria” named Dr. Valdez, who had a Chihuahua named Pepito.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1980, Nora called my house. She was leaving Carl, she said. Suspecting he was having an affair, she had rifled his files—breaking into the cabinet with a letter opener or something—and discovered incriminating receipts and an American Express bill. They were for flowers and jewelry—and in Heartburn a children’s book—the usual stuff, and the recipient was Margaret Jay.

  Nora confronted Carl and he confessed, but they stayed together, barely. Carrying on as if nothing was amiss, they accepted an invitation for an informal dinner at Sally and Ben Bradlee’s home. They ate in the kitchen and at one point discussed, of all things, extramarital affairs. A woman the Bradlees knew was cheating on her husband—boldly, flagrantly. How was it possible that her husband did not know?

  “I said that there was absolutely no way a spouse could be cheating and the other spouse not know about it. It’s just not possible,” Sally recalled. “You have to know about it. You may not want to know about it, but you have to know about it. You may be in denial, but you have to know about it.”

  They were eating fish and drinking white wine.

  Nora asked for red wine. Ben was puzzled. “Red, you want red?”

  She wanted red.

  He fetched a bottle from the bar, opened it, and placed it on the table.

  Nora stood.

  “She took the bottle and walked behind Carl and she started pouring the red wine on top of his head,” Sally remembered. Carl was wearing a brand-new tweed sports jacket that just moments before he had proudly shown off. His hair was long and blown dry.

  “The wine ran down all over his clothes and he just sat there. He didn’t move. And she just kept pouring, glug, glug, glug. It was like slow motion. Nobody said a word. Ben I were staring at each other. Finally she finished emptying the bottle and put it down, and Carl was sitting there with his hair all down. It was this long silence, and finally Ben said, ‘Well, we all go through troubled times.’ One of them said, ‘I think we better go,’ and they got up and left.”

  For the scriptwriter-director, this was a fabulous scene, more riotous than sad, although Nora was certainly hurting and Carl reeling from the pain of ridicule and sudden uncertainty. Here she was, taking charge of the situation, finding the humor, the drama, playing it out before the mighty executive editor of the Washington Post and his star-reporter wife. The incident was bound to go wide, to leave Washington and then New York agape. It was a foreshadowing of Heartburn itself, a chuckly book about betrayal interspersed with recipes for the most delicious food.

  Yet Nora had not done the scene quite as she wanted. In the book and the movie, she changed the wine to a Key lime pie. She would have preferred a blueberry pie, “but Betty [the name Nora gave Sally Quinn] said bring a Key lime pie, so I did.” (She then provided the recipe.)

  But even the Key lime pie or the wine was a variation on something her friend Rusty Unger had done years before. Rusty had been stood up for a New Year’s Eve date, and the next day, in a snowstorm, she hurried down to Greenwich Village to meet a friend for lunch. As she ate, she looked up to see the date breaker from the night before. He was at another table, engrossed in conversation with a woman. Rusty dashed out into the street, scooped up a large snowball, snuck back into the restaurant, and approached the guy from behind. “I tapped him on the shoulder and when he turned around I smashed it into his face.”

  Rusty had told Nora that story, and Nora, as was her wont, put it through rewrite. “She told me that when she poured the bottle of wine over Carl’s head, she was thinking of that snowball,” Rusty said.

  Virtually before Carl could get the wine out of his hair, Nora was gone—back to New York. She fled with alacrity, moving from one friend’s to the next and then to her father’s temporarily available apartment and then to another and finally to the storied Apthorp where, by dint of both her writings and the movie You’ve Got Mail, she became queen of the Upper West Side. But before any of that could happen, she returned to Washington, and I drove her out to the faceless Virginia suburbs and a warehouse where she had stored her stuff. She arranged for the shipping, and then, after a stop at a coffee shop for something to eat, I drove her to the airport and the return to New York.

  Her move had been swift, almost precipitous. She had not so much returned to New York as fled Washington. She had the strength to take action; she had the acquired fear of being hurt again. Carl was acting unpredictably. He was both famous and infamous. I loved Nora, and while I did not hate Carl, I hated what he had done. On paper, he was my best friend, but I came to realize that I knew so little of his life.

  Carl was in a vertiginous plunge, drinking and clinging to whatever self-esteem he had left. He was a good person, he insisted to me. And he was—good in his instincts, great in his talents, and wanting to be better than he knew he had been. He babbled the argot of shrinks and he waxed expansively about his future. I had no idea what was real and what was not—he was, after all, capable of so much—but our friendship was in tatters. We had been two couples, Carl and Nora, Barbara and I—so much fun, so many good meals, so many laughs, so much . . .

  Nora, pregnant and her infant son Jacob in tow, went off to New York. In November of 1979, Max was born. She was essentially a single mother.

  From Coup de Foudre to ‘Heartburn’

  * * *

  Nora’s bereavement was total.

  She returned to New York with some baggage—the one-year-old Jacob and the about-to-be-born Max. At first, she moved into her father’s apartment, and after Max was born, she accepted an invitation from the book editor Robert Gottlieb and his wife, the actress Maria Tucci, to stay with them. The Gottliebs had two young children of their own, and Nora arrived with one child, one infant, one nanny, and one nurse for her preemie. Things were a bit cramped but never tense. By then, the Gottliebs were enamored of Nora. Many years later, they were among the very few Nora told about the sickness that would take her life.

  Bob Gottlieb and Nora had met back in 1969 when, on assignment for the New York Times Book Review, she wrote “Where Bookmen Meet to Eat.” It was about the lunch habits of New York’s important book editors and publishers. It began oddly enough with the book editor Evan Thomas, Sr., who had confessed in an earlier Times piece that he didn’t do lunches at all. Since an expensive lunch was an industry perk as well as a customary way of wooing authors, Thomas’s confession was taken as akin to admitting celibacy or, worse, abstinence.

  It was for this frivolous piece that Nora made a date to interview Gottlieb, then the publisher of Knopf and a man who projected great seriousness. (He was a music, dance, and literary critic as well as a book editor.) They wound up sitting on the floor of his office, eating sandwiches.

  Gottlieb’s feelings for Nora were ardent, and he describes them much as Mike Nichols later would: love at first sight. It was not some zingy chemical attraction but a meeting of the minds where a nod meant Yes, yes—we agree and, what’s more, there are very few of us who do. “We just loved each other on sight and we never looked back” is the way Bob put it.

  And so, ten years after Nora interviewed Gottlieb about publishing industry lunches, she and her children moved into his East Side brownstone. It was a full house, maybe too full, but Nora was not merely on the move, she seemed to be on the lam, fleeing (if she could) a stinging combination of hurt and mortification. Her husband had confessed his love for another woman—and she, to Carl
’s incomprehension, had gone to the tabs with the news. The affair was overloading phone circuits in all the usual places—New York, Los Angeles, Washington, the Hamptons, and, given who Margaret was, London and the whole British Empire. The sun never set on this scandal.

  Carl asked for reconciliation. Come back, please. And she did. But then Carl found himself unable to give up Margaret and so Nora fled the marriage. Her life must have seemed like it was in a washing machine’s tumble cycle. She tried to make sense of it all, but she couldn’t. After all, it made no sense.

  Soon, Carl called me. “The baby’s come,” he said. Barbara and I flew to New York. We saw tiny Max—underweight, crinkly, appearing ahead of schedule—and Nora, dazed and smiling wanly. Carl, steadying himself under the weight of conflicting emotions, wasn’t himself, not at all. He was a new father, clinging to the debris of a marriage he himself had torpedoed, afloat in indecision and confusion. We met later, at Elaine’s. The place was just opening for the night and was completely empty. Still, I was denied a table until I mentioned that I was meeting Carl. He might have suddenly become a man scorned, but he remained a celebrity.

  Nora’s life, always so carefully organized and planned, had gone flying off the page. She had gone from rich to something else. She was not poor, but the financial umbrella her parents had provided was gone. Her mother had died in 1971, and her father was still reeling around, making no money, spending what he didn’t have, showing up drunk and crazed on occasion. (At his death in 1992 he was apparently worth less than $50,000.) She had two kids and no husband. She had tried and then abandoned a book on the American liquor industry, and Viking Press was pushing her to either come up with the book or repay the advance. She could do neither.