She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  Nora was a broken woman, abandoned, scorned—all the usual purple adjectives. She tried to find the humor in her plight, but initially she couldn’t. She had been pregnant when she discovered the affair, and now she was the mother of a toddler and a newborn. She cried often and deeply. She cried when she stayed with Amanda Urban, a close friend and her agent, and her husband, Ken Auletta, and she cried at the Gottliebs. She steeled herself for a new life, making her decision irrevocable by offering news of her breakup to the widely read columnist Liz Smith, yet another Mildred Newman acolyte.

  “Liz, I have a story for you,” Nora said. “Carl and I are going to divorce. Please write it.” On December 19, 1979, Liz reluctantly did as Nora asked. “Writing this scoop makes me feel sick,” she wrote.

  Carl did not want a divorce—he tried to talk Liz out of running the item—but Nora was clearly moving on. By 1980, her relations with Carl had reached their nadir—where, more or less, they stayed. My own friendship with Carl became episodic, encumbered by what had happened and my closeness to Nora, but Nora never inquired about it or protested when I mentioned his name. Occasionally, she would ask about something Carl had done—often something she had read about in the tabloids: Was it true? Often, I didn’t know.

  As the years went on, my friendship with Carl revived some, and yet Nora and I became closer and closer. We talked on the phone frequently—she in New York, me in Washington—and I rented summer places in the Hamptons to be near her—and Carl, originally, and then whomever she was with. She became my manager, my agent, my career counselor, my romantic adviser, my marital therapist. Our only breach came when my marriage broke up. Nora took it hard. I expected her to understand. Initially, she did not. That summer the Hamptons did without me.

  * * *

  At the Gottliebs’ Nora sat down at the typewriter. “The first day I did not think it was funny,” she wrote. She called the book Heartburn, punctuated it with recipes, and had it published by Bob Gottlieb’s Knopf. In due course, it became a script and then a movie and somewhere along the line a how-to book for women trying to pick themselves off the floor after a betrayal.

  “She took the worst thing that can happen to one personally, wounded to the quick, weeping for months, and turned it around,” Mike Nichols said. “I’ve always thought that people don’t survive being publicly cuckolded, but she caught the knife in midair and turned it around. She turned it around, and she wasn’t the one that was harmed.

  “She did it by writing every day and crying all the time, but writing the next day, too. She made it funny. There’s no one else on earth who could have made it funny and have cried all the time. I think that everybody saw her do it. Some were scared by her because it was incredibly powerful. She had an iron will and she was able to do something that had seemed impossible.”

  * * *

  Before writers write on paper, they write in their head. Nora wrote Heartburn in conversations with herself and others. She did not say she was thinking of writing a fictionalized account of her marital breakup, but she started to recount it, to shape it, to see what worked and what did not. She tried it out one day in San Antonio, Texas, on the writer Marie Brenner. Nora had gone down to Houston to promote her new book, a collection of media pieces titled Scribble, Scribble, and then hopped over to San Antonio to see Marie, who had come home for medical reasons.

  The two had a lot in common. They both were writers. They both were committed New Yorkers who had come from elsewhere—Nora from Beverly Hills, Marie from San Antonio—and Marie had dated Carl. It was at a party Marie gave that Carl and Nora met. Marie saw it happen—a locking of the eyes, a meeting of the gaze.

  “I saw the coup de foudre,” she said, using the French phrase for passionate love at first sight. “It happened right in front of me. He took her number down.”

  Nora called Marie the next day with a question. “ ‘Are you really sure you’re through with him?’ she said. ‘Trust me, I am.’ ” And then Marie added a caveat: “Trust me, this is not going to work.”

  In San Antonio, Nora and Marie went for a drive. Nora wanted to see the Alamo and other sights. Marie played tour guide, but her mind was on her own condition. She had recently been diagnosed with melanoma and was recovering from massive skin grafts. As they drove, Nora recounted her breakup with Carl. Much of it was news to Marie. The story was gripping, sad and outrageous, and Nora cried some of the time—and then, it seems, never again. But this was one writer listening to another, and Marie could detect that tragedy was being nudged into comedy. Nora was shaping the material, blanching it of pain and seasoning it with humor. This was her story and she would not be the victim. She would not play the fool. Carl would.

  Get the Bromo_Heartburn All Around

  * * *

  Heartburn has attained the status of a classic, but when it was published in 1983, it was considered controversial and occasionally denounced as tasteless. Carl certainly felt that way, and he greeted the news of a movie sale by getting a lawyer and having the case moved from New York to Washington. In the end, he got pretty much what he wanted—which was, above all, joint custody of his boys and to be portrayed “at all times as a caring, loving and conscientious father.” Those words are from a curious document titled “Attachment A to the Marital Separation Agreement Between Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein.” In other words, if Nora wanted a divorce, she was going to have make some changes to Heartburn. She did.

  So did Mike Nichols and Paramount. The attachment was the culmination of a legal tussle. Carl not only demanded that he be portrayed as a dutiful and loving father, but he insisted that his kids not be portrayed in the movie or, if they were depicted, that they would be shown as females. His real children, meanwhile, were not to be allowed to attend any publicity event for the movie, and Nora was prohibited from ever writing about them. Nora agreed.

  She agreed further on inserting a description of Carl’s exemplary behavior in the immediate aftermath of Max’s premature birth. “Carl, over the objections of the hospital staff, remained with me during the delivery of our child,” she stated. “During the following five weeks, in which our son was hospitalized, Carl spent almost every day feeding, holding, and caring for our baby.”

  Carl got a first look at the script. He got to meet with Nichols and offer objections, if any. None of this was necessarily unique—scripts often become legal tugs-of-war—but it was possibly the first time such a document was inserted in a divorce agreement. Paramount Pictures and Mike Nichols signed off on it, Mike thinking Carl had a case. At Carl’s insistence, “The Attachment” was filed with the court and remained public. It was 1985. After more than five years of often bitter and always expensive negotiations, Carl and Nora were finally divorced. Heartburn, a work of more or less fiction, was ready to shoot.

  The attachment was liberally quoted in the Washington Post and almost entirely reprinted in Harper’s magazine. It made for juicy reading, but to those who knew Nora and Carl at the time, it made for painful reading. Carl’s wariness about Nora’s intentions were manifest and raw. He didn’t trust her one bit. And, in essence, was vigorously asserting his rights as a father.

  As far as she was concerned, she was being compelled to guarantee that she wouldn’t do what she would not have thought of doing in the first place—using her children to get back at Carl. Sadly for Nora, though, Carl was hardly alone in thinking that Heartburn had crossed a line.

  In Vanity Fair, the critic Leon Wieseltier, writing under the nom de plume Tristan Vox, found the book disgusting in all respects—even the writing—and rendered the most hurtful judgment of all: “The infidelity of husband toward a wife is banal compared to the infidelity of a mother toward her children. Here is Carl Bernstein and adultery; there is Nora Ephron and child abuse. It is no contest.”

  Nora was devastated.

  Wieseltier is an especially powerful and occasionally viperous writer, but his was a common refrain: What about the kids? What about Jacob and Max? When they g
rew up, what would they think of their father, not to mention their mother? What would they have to endure in school, on the playground? They would be the talk of the crowd at the Upper West Side’s sliding pond, the sandbox, the lox line at Zabar’s. They would be ruined.

  Nora insisted otherwise. She furiously refused to concede that she had risked her kids’ well-being in an attempt to make a buck and get back at Carl. What’s more, she resented the implication that there was something untoward or unsporting in not suffering her betrayal in stoical silence . . . as a good wife supposedly should. Some wondered why she had acted—overreacted actually—and made such a big deal over what was, to many people, a run-of-the-mill infidelity?

  The book troubled me as well. I was, as usual, torn between Nora and Carl. Nora was in pain, but so was Carl, and the case he made about the book’s effect on his kids hardly seemed nonsensical. On the other hand, Nora was certain it would do no harm—and Nora’s certainty was vault-like. She never paused in her determination to see the book become a movie, not a moment’s hesitation. She insisted she knew what she was doing.

  Here again I was talking across a cultural gulf—and so was she. My preference, I admit, was for silence, for her to have treated Carl’s affair with Margaret Jay as a secret—this stinky thing to be buried out in the backyard. The book, though, was one thing, the movie something else again. It raised the stakes considerably—premieres and spotlights arching the night sky. Movies mean interviews and television commercials and a final product that is shown on a screen that is appropriately immense, twenty feet high and forty feet wide. We all respect books; we adore movies.

  Nora had been raised in the maelstrom of Hollywood banality. The extravaganza was just another day at the office for her parents. Pictures came and pictures went—and so did stars and, of course, screenwriters. It was all very big but as evanescent as the articles in last month’s fan magazine. A movie opened bombastically with a premiere and a dinner and many interviews—and then, as all Hollywood knew, often nothing happened. It died. It evaporated. Gone. The hurt of the flops could last longer than the joy of the hits. Failure was always watching from the balcony.

  Nora had had her own experience with the uninvited spotlight. Her letters home from college were expropriated by her parents for their play Take Her, She’s Mine. She was twenty when the play opened on Broadway, twenty-two when it became a movie and she metamorphosed into Sandra Dee, a 1960s-era movie star of insufferable cuteness. Nora had been older than her boys when this all happened, but she had experienced the leers of her college classmates and the unavoidable sense of having had two existences—the real one and the reel one, which audiences of course, felt was even more real. Still, it came, it went—and that was that. Her boys would become men and they would understand, as indeed they did. But it took some time.

  In the meantime, she put her head down, tucked in her chin, and just kept on going. She was modestly accustomed to being in the center of a storm—the blowback from Dolly Schiff and the concussive effect of “Breasts.” Another piece comes to mind in that respect. It was a trifle she wrote in 1975 and it was called “Crabs.” It was about how the sexually transmitted little crustaceans were passed around a group of friends.

  The friends were “neither fact nor fiction,” Nora wrote. But to people in the know, which was New York’s Nora set, they were fact and not fiction. They were real people. I knew that. But I was a Washingtonian, and I needed to have the piece annotated so I could know who was who. I could not ask, because that would amount to a confession of being a rube, and I was, in my bones, a New Yorker.

  So I guessed, listened at the dinner table for clues, and wondered if a comeuppance was in the offing. It never happened. She had virtually named real people as having this awful ailment, this condition—this thing out of a horror movie with scratchy stuff crawling around one’s crotch (Is this what crabs is?). And they, moreover, had gotten it sleeping where they should not have with people they should not have. And Nora, who had presumably learned some of this in confidence, had written it all.

  “Crabs” left me in awe, not to mention flabbergasted. It was written in disregard of any consequences. The people alluded to were not defenseless civilians but were armed to the teeth with typewriters of their own and with regular publishing outlets. They could retaliate, if not in print then in the corner of the room at a cocktail party. Nora could be whispered to death, shunned, banned, banished—from Elaine’s and other places that mattered.

  She didn’t seem to care. The article, the piece—the facts and the non-facts—was like a tank, impregnable, and so was the person who wrote it. I still recall one of the characters in “Crabs,” a writer Nora expanded upon at dinner, gallivanting around someone’s bedroom trying to hoist up his pantyhose. My God, the thought of it almost made me dizzy, not to mention apprehensive:

  What might she write about me?

  Nora was my friend. I loved her. But she was a killer.

  Heartburn, of course, was her most famous bunker-buster endeavor. Nora not only wrote it in flamboyant disregard of the consequences, but while driving straight at Carl, she casually ran over some other people as well. One of them was Dan Greenburg. Their divorce had been amicable, but Heartburn put it on the rocks. Nora invoked a thinly disguised Dan as a walk-on—an ex-husband who kept hamsters and dressed them up in adorable little outfits. The character was a complete invention, a version of Nora and Dan’s attempt to dress their two cats, Bernie and Arnold, in tiny sombreros they had bought in Mexico. The cats preferred to go hatless and that was that.

  The Ephron-Greenburg marriage lasted nine years, some of them—especially the early ones—quite wonderful. It was followed by the nicest, most pleasant divorce possible, handled by a single lawyer. Nora and Dan had simply grown apart, but they still liked each other and, amazingly, occasionally even dated. Their relationship was so amicable that when Nora told Dan that the people in her therapy group said she should have received a larger share of the house the two had owned in East Hampton, he wrote her a check on the spot. Still, all good divorces must end for some reason and this one did. Heartburn, it turned out, got two husbands with one shot.

  Nora alerted Dan to what she had done and assured him it was harmless. At first, he agreed. But then Mildred Newman, on whom the character Vera was based, went to work on him: “How could you stand what she did to you? She mocked you. She made fun of you, she lampooned you. She made a fool of you.”

  Mildred had few rules—she socialized with members of her groups, for instance—but mocking the shrink herself could not be countenanced. Nora was effectively named a “non-party person,” an old Communist Party term which applied in this case because as with the old CP, membership in the group was secret and thrillingly subversive. Nora became anathema. To Mildred she was a skunk. (Nonetheless, when Mildred died in 2001, Bernie asked Nora to do the eulogy. She was, everyone remembers, terrific.)

  Mildred got to Dan. When Craig Horowitz of New York magazine called to ask what he thought of Heartburn, he allowed his resentment to get the better of him. “Nora is a much classier person and a much better writer than is evident in this book,” he said.

  Nora cut him dead.

  “That was the end of our relationship,” he said. “She and Mildred got back together again. I never resumed my relationship with Nora.”

  The publication of Heartburn left me flummoxed. I didn’t know what to make of the book. For guidance, I looked to Nora’s then boyfriend, Joe Fox. He approved of the book. Fox was an esteemed senior editor at Random House, a product of the Waspy Philadelphia Main Line, an elegant man of simple tastes (while traveling, he eschewed complicated dishes for simple ones that invariably tasted better), a Harvard graduate, and a proper member of proper clubs.

  For all of that, Fox was an odd fellow who seemed to collect idiosyncrasies as a hobby—he wore a ratty, moth-eaten tennis sweater, carried his tennis gear in a straw basket, chain-smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes, and drove a Volvo
so fatigued it had the automobile equivalent of fallen arches. His city apartment was on Central Park South, a duplex with lofty studio windows overlooking the park, which he furnished in pedigreed hand-me-downs—a Sheraton-era desk, for example, which at auction would refill his depleted coffers. He had been married and had four sons.

  Out on Long Island, Fox had a squat, utterly suburban house on a cul-de-sac in Sagaponack. The front was pure Levittown, but the back was pastoral Hamptons. It looked out on Sagaponack Pond and a lazy creek that oozed to the nearby ocean. He furnished the place in a shabby-chic style which Nora abhorred and would, if she could, have had condemned on health grounds alone. She installed a new kitchen with a beast of a Garland stove and deposited a handsome master bedroom over the garage, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Nora would have gotten to the rest of the house in good time, but the relationship didn’t last long enough.

  Fox had impeccable literary credentials. After Fox died, John Irving, the novelist, wrote about him in the New Yorker. The article was titled “Fox Here,” which was the way Fox announced himself on the phone, and it mentioned not only his brilliance as a book editor but also his role as the center of a Hamptons literary set. Irving listed some of those he had met through Fox: James Salter, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton just for starters. Fox had introduced me to some of the same people as well, and so his influence on me was great. Writers listen to great editors. I listened to Fox.

  What did Fox think of Nora’s book? He wore bespoke suits with an inside jacket pocket for cigarettes. He reached down for one, lit up, and as the smoke rushed from him, exhaled a gleeful giggle. Fun, he said. The book was fun, he pronounced—as if it were adultery itself. But he was a book editor, which meant both that he was accustomed to handling controversial books and that the book itself came first. If feelings were going to be taken into account—even matters of taste—then many good books would not be written. Fox was an editor, and Nora, while not his writer, was a writer. He nonchalantly dismissed the book as no big deal.