She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  * * *

  Nora was a woman of many talents, but she was inept at public displays of pain. She seemed too confident, too successful, too powerful, and too disdainful. But she could be hurt. With Heartburn, she was under attack, defending herself against an accusation that could only be disproved over time. If her kids turned out all right, she would be exonerated—not that the critics would track them and then, years later, write an apology.

  No one wrote in those terms, raising the question and then saying only time would provide an answer. The conditional tense was eschewed. It was for the literary faint of heart. No one was permitted to wonder, to wait and see, to write that stale phrase, “Time will tell.” The critics criticized and moved on, but I stayed, and once—just once—I oh so tentatively ventured that I could understand why Nora’s critics were saying what they were saying—nothing stronger than that, I assure you. She whirled on me. “Do you think I would do anything to hurt my kids? Don’t you think I’m a good mother? I know what I’m doing.”

  From everything I could see, she did.

  * * *

  All these years later, I retain a residue of doubt about Heartburn. In his documentary about his mother, Jacob acknowledged that those were tough years for him, but he is fine, his brother is fine. Jacob is a writer and filmmaker, accomplished at both. Max is a musician—guitarist and arranger, and much in demand as both—and splendidly married. Their success thrilled Nora—a mother’s expected love, certainly, but something more, absolutely. Maybe vindication.

  Heartburn endures. Lines from it get quoted to me all the time. It was written under incredibly difficult circumstances—“a tear on every page,” Nichols said—and it was a tour de force in literary judo, using the weight of mortification to produce humor. It was most certainly not a scathing jeremiad—if it had been, it would be forgotten by now—but it has been embraced as one by women for whom betrayal is either in their past or feared for the future. In terms of staying power, Heartburn is a classic.

  The Paper Eater Makes a Picture

  * * *

  A story about Karen Silkwood in a 1975 issue of Ms. magazine caught the attention of Sam Cohn, an important film and theatrical agent who, besides absentmindedly eating paper when under stress, represented Nora. Cohn, who died in 2009, was one of those semi-mythical figures who seem created for colorful obituaries. In addition to eating the occasional napkin, he was a movie agent who loathed Los Angeles, who rarely returned a phone call, who eschewed the limo for the subway, who dressed one notch up from a derelict, and who, rather than having a tiresome contempt for his clients, was in absolute awe of their talents.

  Cohn was renowned for structuring fortress-like deals that could withstand the sappers of any movie studio’s legal department. He was phenomenally loyal to his clients, and he was, almost without a doubt, the single most important film agent in New York City. In fact, he was the indifferently dressed, if unheralded, center of the New York film world.

  At the time that Cohn read that Ms. magazine article, he was representing Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Robin Williams, Liza Minnelli, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Roy Scheider, Hume Cronyn, Zero Mostel, Jackie Gleason, and Macaulay Culkin; among directors his clients included Robert Altman, Robert Benton, Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, Arthur Penn, and Louis Malle. He also represented Woody Allen and his writing partner (Annie Hall, Manhattan) Marshall Brickman, as well as the playwrights John Guare, Arthur Miller, and for just about everything—plays, books, movies—the acclaimed novelist E. L. Doctorow.

  Nora had written an article for the same issue of Ms., the feminist magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem. Nora’s piece was a review of the book Naked Nomads by the relentless antifeminist (his description) George Gilder, also an extremely conservative economics writer who, for a short while, was to the Reagan administration what Marx was to Lenin’s. He was so many fish in Nora’s barrel. She reloaded many times.

  Nora’s piece is both funny and smart, but it’s the one about Silkwood that holds our attention here, and that—not that she could have known it at the time—changed her life.

  * * *

  At the age of twenty-eight, Karen Silkwood died in an automobile accident when her car ran off an Oklahoma highway and careened into a culvert. She was on her way to meet David Burnham, a New York Times reporter, to tell him about allegedly unsafe conditions at the Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma where she worked and where she had become a union activist.

  The plant manufactured highly radioactive plutonium for nuclear reactors. It was amazingly dangerous stuff. It could kill. In fact, it was apparently killing Silkwood. She had been contaminated.

  Almost no aspect of the Silkwood story was straightforward. How had she been contaminated? Had it happened at the plant or had she contaminated herself? Had she died in an accident or was it actually murder? Was she high on drugs that night, a touch drunk, or solemnly sober? Had she started out to see Burnham with a file of material she was going to show him, and if so, what had happened to it? (It was never recovered.) Was she a stable woman, and, if so, why had she surrendered custody of her kids to her ex-husband, merely remarking that he would provide a calmer environment? For a heroine, Karen Silkwood had much to answer for.

  But for Ms. magazine, the story had much going for it. In Silkwood it had the stigmatized woman, sexually active and therefore considered immoral, the (very) bad multinational corporation, the good union guys, the hideous nuclear threat, and an indifferent or corrupt criminal justice system that could not see the supposed accident for the murder it might have been.

  * * *

  Cohn asked Nora to write a screenplay about Silkwood. She had already done a TV movie and was clearly aiming for a big-time career as a screenwriter. When, in fact, she and Carl got their hands on William Goldman’s script of All the President’s Men, they had the epic chutzpah to rewrite it. (Goldman, a volcanic figure, predictably erupted.) Still, Silkwood was a particularly challenging project if only because Silkwood herself was a particularly challenging character. As ultimately played by Meryl Streep, she was coquettishly charming but explosively foul-mouthed, a beer-swigging pill popper. She presented a challenge to any screenwriter, especially one who was fairly new at the game.

  Nora knew nothing about Oklahoma. But sometime before Cohn had handed her the Ms. article, she had run into the budding screenwriter Alice Arlen on the Washington–New York shuttle. They struck up a conversation, the usual lunch followed, and following the usual lunch came a discussion in Nora’s office at Esquire. Alice, it turned out, had been studying film at Columbia and writing screenplays. In addition, she came from the Midwest—not exactly trailer trash Oklahoma, but Chicago and one of its foremost families, the Medill Patterson clan, publishers of newspapers (the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Washington Herald) and patrons of the arts, crafts, and everything else worthwhile. Still, she would do.

  Alice was atypical in so many ways, but not as a Nora friend. She was connected to almost everyone who was anyone. She had been married to James Hoge, editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, later to be editor of the New York Daily News and then editor of Foreign Affairs, the publication of the august Council on Foreign Relations. (His brother, Warren, had been the longtime boyfriend of Sally Quinn and later would be a high-ranking editor at the New York Times.) Alice had since married Michael Arlen, the highly regarded television critic for the New Yorker and the author of Living-Room War, the classic account of television’s coverage of Vietnam.

  Alice flung herself into the project. She went down to Los Alamos, New Mexico, sort of ground zero for America’s nuclear weapons program, and came back with a box full of notes. She and Nora completed a first draft and then Cohn completed the deal. He got Nichols. He got Streep. He got the movie made.

  Nora and Meryl had met only once before they all convened in Grapevine, Texas, for the filming of Silkwood. The initial meeting must have taken place at Sam Cohn’s office, but Streep has only the dimmest memory of it.
What she remembers, though, is Cohn saying to her, “Nora is an investigative reporter. She has a journalistic background. Let’s get her to write this.”

  Nora had done some hard reporting and she certainly knew how to use the phone, but she was by no means an investigative reporter. Nonetheless, within a year, the script was ready, Streep had signed on, and Nichols was ready to go. They all assembled on a set built in a warehouse. The place had a little kitchen which became the clubhouse for the women—Nora, Alice, Meryl, Cher (in her first major screen role), and Ann Roth, the costume designer. Streep called the group “this little coven of women.”

  Nichols was not a dictatorial director, not some authoritarian auteur. He would take suggestions from anyone, but once filming was completed, he went into the editing room and the film was his and his alone. Until then, he convened a jolly group of stalkers, the women watching their leader, Nora watching Mike the most—or most intently. She was going to direct someday, and she was going to learn (if she did not already know it) that the movie belonged to the director and that the character who was born in the writer’s imagination—a person who, on the page, did precisely as the writer wanted—rebelled when filming began and answered to someone else entirely.

  Any movie is in danger of sudden death—if the script doesn’t work, if the star balks, or, as happened to Nichols on a 1975 movie called Bogart Slept Here, if the star just doesn’t understand the part. On the fifth or sixth day of shooting that movie, Nichols concluded that Robert De Niro was not working out and the dailies looked like “shit.” To De Niro’s everlasting dismay—and considerable anger—Nichols abruptly abandoned the project. The script, by Neil Simon, was later reworked as The Goodbye Girl, and Richard Dreyfuss won the Best Actor Oscar for it.

  * * *

  At the time Sam Cohn was assembling Silkwood, Nichols was hardly in any position to walk out on anything. He had not made a feature film since 1975, and his two previous efforts, The Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune had bombed, both critically and at the box office. (The Fortune had starred both Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, a seemingly failure-proof pairing.) Nichols needed a hit.

  In other words, he needed Meryl Streep. Streep was well on her way to becoming the dominant and most successful female actor of her era. She had already appeared in seven movies, all in starring roles, including the just-concluded Sophie’s Choice, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress. (Sophie’s Choice, budgeted at $9 million, had taken in more than $30 million.) Before that, she had won Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer and been nominated for her performances in The Deer Hunter and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. She had also appeared in Julia, Manhattan, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan, choice roles all.

  For Streep, the project was the fortunate marriage of ideology and juicy role. Silkwood had feminist credentials. Meryl Streep was—and remains—a feminist. (She at one time asked Nora to write a script based on the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a founding American feminist and suffragette. The project went no further than lunch.)

  * * *

  Silkwood was hardly formulaic. The usually fetching Streep was not going to fall in love. She was not going to get the guy. She was not even going to survive the end of the movie. Karen Silkwood was an activist who could well have been a man. A man, though, would not have had his sex life held against him—a certain promiscuity suggesting a certain instability.

  The movie was a women’s project all the way, beginning with the Ms. magazine piece, itself written by a woman (B. J. Phillips), which was then made into a screenplay by two others and a movie starring two more. None of these women were oblivious to the feminist statement being made.

  This was especially true for Streep, who for the first time in her career had come in early on a project—not merely handed a script, but allowed to participate in its development. She had expressed such a strong interest in Silkwood that she was momentarily unsure in retrospect if, in fact, she had brought it to Cohn and not, as she finally came to realize, the other way around. Whatever the case, something magical happened to her on the Silkwood set. She went into wardrobe as Meryl Streep and came out as Karen Silkwood.

  “She was wearing cowboy boots with no socks, an extremely short denim skirt, no stockings, no socks; a T-shirt, very tight, no bra, and her cigarettes rolled into the T-shirt sleeve, a pack of cigarettes, and a cowboy hat,” Mike Nichols remembered. “I had to sit down. I got dizzy.

  “It was so fucking carnal. It was so, ‘Are you ready to fuck me?’ It was one of those movie experiences. It is everybody falling in love with everybody. It was wildly sexual just being there. We were all having a good time. Everybody was discovering everybody else. It was the first time I worked with Meryl, and I couldn’t fucking believe what it was like. I could not.”

  Ann Roth, the costume designer, had conjured a transformation. She had roughed up Streep, and then Streep on her own decided to go from blond to mousy brown, changing her hair and her social class with one or two rinses of dye. The Vassar-educated Presbyterian from horsey Bernardsville, New Jersey, became a shit-kicking Oklahoman in a flash. Nichols had opposed the dye job, but not after he saw it. Streep was a triumph of trash.

  * * *

  Nora, meanwhile, was holding down two jobs. Along with Alice, she was reworking the script, but she was also keeping an eye on Nichols, watching a director direct so that she could someday do it herself. “She was just a huge pair of eyes and ears,” Nichols remembered. He imagined Nora following him with a camera. “I heard clicking all the time.”

  Roth noticed, too. “She’s learning,” Nichols told her.

  “And then I started watching Nora learn. That was pretty interesting. There was no question. She knew what she wanted out of that.”

  Silkwood was budgeted at about $10 million and took in a bit more than $35 million—a success by anyone’s reckoning. It was a stupendous achievement for Nora and Alice, and they were nominated for screenwriting Oscars. Nora went to the ceremony insisting that she would not win. She was right. The Academy Award went to the veteran Horton Foote for Tender Mercies.

  Foote had won once before, for To Kill a Mockingbird, so it was hardly a disgrace to lose to him. It was virtually an Oscar in itself for Nora and Alice to be nominated right off the bat. As proof of that, she and Nick and Alice and Michael Arlen were invited to the exclusive après-awards party given by the famed agent Samuel “Swifty” Lazar. Nora was nominated two more times as a screenwriter, for When Harry Met Sally . . . and Sleepless in Seattle. She never did win.

  Nora accepted her loss—actually, Foote’s win—with equanimity. She knew that she had already won entrée into the select group of screenwriters who could deliver. In fact, two of the other “losers”—Streep had been nominated for Best Actress and Nichols for Best Director—were already heading to their next project. Nora would write it, Nichols would direct it, and Streep would star. She would play Nora.

  Where’s My Kitchen?

  * * *

  It turned out that my Washington house did not look like a Washington house. This was the judgment of Paramount, the studio that made Heartburn, and so my expectation that my weary kitchen would be updated and the outside of the house given some badly needed paint was dashed. As far as I was concerned, this was yet another sad Hollywood story.

  In fact, the movie wasn’t really filmed in Washington at all. The lone exception was an exterior shot of a house located in the city’s Capitol Hill section and owned by a Washington Post colleague of mine—probably the richest person on the staff and undoubtedly someone not in need of a new kitchen. Another scene was shot in Alexandria, Virginia, a Georgetown clone across the Potomac from Washington. The rest of the movie was filmed in New York.

  Heartburn opened in the summer of 1986, by which time Nora was living with Nick Pileggi—or he with her, actually. Nick had moved into the apartment in the Apthorp where he, in time, would establish an office high in one of the building’s rooftop aeries. Nora would take yet a
nother Apthorp apartment for her own office.

  With three apartments, Nora and Nick quickly established themselves as major Upper West Side figures. The neighborhood was to her liking. Zabar’s, the celebrated and nearly mythical food emporium, was a mere one block north and Nora was one of its more famous patrons. (She made a cameo appearance in a film about Zabar’s attempted by Rachel Zabar but never completed.) Citarella’s, not quite as renowned but better for rotisserie chicken, was only four blocks to the south, and when a union threw up a picket line blocking its entrance, Nora had a genuine, if somewhat comical, crisis. She was constitutionally unable to cross a picket line. On the other hand, the fish at Citarella’s was nonpareil, especially the baby clams. Nora did what she could. The strike was precipitated by the firing of three employees who allegedly walked out over working conditions. Fire them, the shop’s lawyer suggested. Nora had a better idea. Fire the lawyer, she told the shop’s owner on the phone.

  The Apthorp was built between 1906 and 1908 and covered a square city block. It was a massive structure, twelve stories high, with a rare interior courtyard that, for all its Old World charm, meant that some apartments were deprived of light. Not Nora’s, however. It looked out over West End Avenue and, beyond it and Riverside Drive, the thrilling Hudson River. After that, came Jersey, which, on a clear day, was still Jersey.