She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  Nora wrote about Zabar’s. She wrote about Citarella’s. She had Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan walk the streets of the Upper West Side in You’ve Got Mail. It’s hard to say she made her neighborhood famous—it had been featured in numerous movies, including Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters—but she helped to make it chic—so fashionable that the Apthorp’s zooming rents eventually forced her out. She decamped to the Upper East Side, where, with the same enthusiasm, she discovered another Citarella’s and numerous other stores catering to what has to be the world’s most affluent and demanding customers.

  * * *

  In Heartburn, the character based on Nora repairs to her father’s spacious Apthorp apartment, but for most of the movie she’s in Washington. For this movie, I again had to play the role of the Carl Bernstein expert. This time it was not Dustin Hoffman who came to see me in my tiny, airless, glass-enclosed office at the Washington Post, but the extravagantly talented singer and actor Mandy Patinkin. He stuffed himself into my cramped office’s only guest chair—and confessed himself puzzled: Why had Nora left Carl?

  He was having an affair, I said.

  So what? Patinkin said.

  I understood what Patinkin was saying. Extramarital affairs are common and not always reason enough to sunder a marriage. I know Carl felt that way—not that he had not grievously wronged his wife but that she had overreacted. Patinkin, in any event, never made it onto the screen. Nichols fired him for lacking the requisite chemistry with Meryl Streep. Patinkin took his firing hard—“I thought my life was over,” he told the New York Times in 2013—and discomforted everyone by showing up somewhat dazed on the set anyway. He apparently was surprised by his firing. Maybe for the wrong reason, I was not.

  * * *

  Patinkin’s replacement turned out to be no less problematic, but in a different way. He was Jack Nicholson, who was not, as was Patinkin, a stage actor looking to make a name for himself in movies, but already a titanic Hollywood figure. By the time he signed for Heartburn, Nicholson had been nominated for eight Oscars and had won twice—for Best Actor in a Leading Role for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1979) and for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Terms of Endearment (1984). He was not only one hell of an actor, but unlike Patinkin, he had an outsized off-screen persona as a gadabout and roué. In a clichéd, tabloid sense, he was perfect to play Carl, but bringing him on changed the chemistry of the cast. Nicholson was no mere actor. He was a movie star.

  Almost imperceptibly, the story started to drift his way. Nora probably noticed, but she was the writer and in no position to countermand Nichols. Streep was, and she stepped in. “I said, ‘This is about a person who got hit by the truck. It’s not about the truck.’

  “They forgot about that for a minute, when he first came in,” she said. “They really did.”

  * * *

  Among the subjects I did not discuss with Nora were the challenges and difficulties of being a female director. We talked movies and moviemaking plenty of times—the inhumane stinginess of the studio, for instance, or the demands of stars for something another star had (John Travolta wanted a third trailer, just like Will Smith.)—but not the challenges of being a woman in a job usually held by men. It took Meryl Streep to provide some insight.

  Meryl Streep has spent a lifetime being directed by men. Of her approximately seventy films, only a handful were directed by women—one of them being Nora’s Julie & Julia. As a result, she is keenly aware of what happens when the character of a woman—the story of a woman, the emotions of a woman, the very soul of a woman—gets interpreted by a man.

  “It’s harder for men to imagine they are women than for women to imagine themselves on the male trajectory through a story. I’m not sure why that is, but I do know that with directors, having a female protagonist is a bigger leap than for a woman to imagine what it’s like to be the guy.”

  Nonetheless, not even Streep could fully contain Nicholson. He was a riveting screen personality, and he endowed Carl with a winning humanity that was entirely lacking in the book—and that, at Carl’s insistence, had gone into the movie script.

  Still, for all the attention the movie got, Heartburn was no blockbuster. It was, at best, a modest hit and it garnered no awards. The critics were not kind. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert panned it. “This is a bitter, sour movie about two people who are only marginally interesting,” he wrote.

  Ebert was an important critic. Walter Goodman was less so, but his newspaper, the New York Times, was more important than either of them. “It isn’t the actors’ fault,” he wrote with apparent regret. “Heartburn stands as testimony to the limitations of star power.”

  The pallid reviews notwithstanding, Heartburn was a huge success for Nora. As a screenwriter, she now had two movies to her credit—a lifetime’s for all too many writers. Nicholson had expanded a small picture into a huge one, but he was not even remotely Carl. Streep, though, became Nora, and Nora emerged through Streep as a distinct personality in her own right. She had written the movie based on her own book, but what mattered most was that in the addled mind of the American public, she had been given substance on the very big screen.

  “I highly recommend Meryl Streep play you,” Nora said at Streep’s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award tribute. “If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl to play you. You will feel much better. If you get rear-ended in a parking lot, have Meryl Streep play you. If the dingo eats your baby, call Meryl.”

  In 2007, secretly sick with cancer, Nora called Streep one last time. She asked her to read the script for Julie & Julia.

  Cover for Me Kid, and You Can Use My Bathroom

  * * *

  I need to be upfront: In writing this book, I discovered nothing I did not already know about Nora. Sure, I found a detail here or a detail there—and there a lover and here a lover and everywhere a lover. But that was when she was young, and anyway, she had hinted at most of these affairs in her writings. Simply put, Nora was exactly who she claimed to be. It was the same with her marriage to Nick Pileggi. It was as splendid as she claimed.

  Many marriages are lies in one way or another. Either the couple is not as happy as they pretend or not having sex as often as they hint—or they hate their kids or are having affairs or have no respect for each other or are harboring seething resentments from something that happened long before you ever met them.

  Not Nora and Nick. Nora’s son Jacob once said that he never saw Nick and Nora fight. No doubt. But I did. It happened just once, and it was over so quickly that I cannot remember what it was about. I do remember being shocked that it had happened at all. We were at some restaurant, Nora seated across from me, Nick on my right. He said something. She sharply rebuked him, and he instantly shut her down, more by manner than by words. She retreated, and it was over—as swift and as clean as the report of a rifle. It never happened again—not in my presence and not, I would guess, anywhere else, either.

  Nora and Nick were in a swoon for each other. I saw them both frequently, incessantly, ate with them, boated with them, and flew with them. I went to Italy with them and France with them and England and Spain and the Caribbean, and Miami and California over and over again. I stayed at their apartment in Manhattan and their place in the Hamptons, and although I looked, I peered and sometimes wondered, I detected not a mite of disaffection between them. They loved each other. They respected each other. They found joy in each other. It was a grand affair.

  The daily newspapers were printed for Nick and Nora. That’s the way it seemed. They read them all and discussed what they found interesting, and if I called later in the day—say, mid-morning—Nick would tell me what Nora thought and Nora would tell me what Nick thought, and rarely, if at all, did one think differently from the other, and if they did think differently, each thought the other was cute.

  My calls were often made out of necessity: I needed a column. Something had happened. It was in the papers. What did it mean? Between Nora and Nick—m
ore often Nora—I usually found some meaning in what had happened. If she was not right, she was at least interesting. I’d settle.

  * * *

  Nora met Nick not long after she ended her relationship with Joe Fox. She had been hospitalized for the removal of her thyroid gland. It was a minor but emotionally fraught procedure because, as always, Nora knew everything that could go wrong. Above all, she feared cancer. She did not fear it in some abstract way, as we all do, but always as an imminent possibility. She’d talk about the high rate of breast cancer on Long Island and wonder if it had anything to do with overhead power lines or whether, as later became clear, it was the large number of Ashkenazic Jewish women, who have a genetic disposition toward breast cancer.

  Later, when cell phones came along, Nora worried about whether they could cause brain cancer. There were reports about this in the press at the time, and it seemed somewhat plausible that holding a little radio transmitter to your ear could ultimately do some damage. I kidded her about it, saying there was no escaping fate. If the person next you on the street was using a cell phone, the impulses would go through you on the way to him. And, I would add, if that person was speaking a guttural language, such as German, the waves would necessarily be more powerful. It was best to stand next to a French-speaking person, I advised. It took her a minute or two to catch on. She laughed—always a great triumph for me.

  Nora both recognized that her fear was unfounded and recognized at the same time that the fear was real. Her uncle Dickie had died very young from cancer, and his death had a profound and deleterious impact on Phoebe Ephron, who had virtually raised her much younger brother. Nora summered on Long Island. Nora was an Ashkenazic Jew. Nora worried.

  Joe Fox did not. He had been good to Nora as well as being good for Nora, but he was a man of resolute, virtually metronomic habits. And so when the time came for him to get into his weary Volvo and drive to his weekend place, he did so—leaving Nora in the hospital.

  That did it for her. She ended the relationship, and they both seemed to suffer little afterward. They were an odd couple to begin with. Nora could not get over Joe’s WASP ways, including membership in an exclusive Manhattan social club that she insisted was anti-Semitic (Joe insisted it was not), and moreover, he had an impecunious approach to food. He hoarded leftovers in plastic containers that he ferried back and forth to New York City.

  Joe moved on—another marriage, a son, and, too soon, a nap in his office from which he never awoke. He was sixty-nine. He had been a father, soldier, baccarat player, ladies’ man, book editor, muse to many writers, and, for all time, the Tom Hanks character in Nora’s You’ve Got Mail. She forgave him.

  * * *

  Nicholas Pileggi was nothing like Joe Fox. Nick was Brooklyn, not Main Line. His father, Nicholas, was an immigrant from Calabria, in the poor south of Italy; his mother, Susan, was also Calabrian but only by descent. She had been born in America. Both of course were Catholics, not WASPs like the Foxes. Nick’s school was Brooklyn-based Long Island University, not Cambridge’s Harvard. Joe belonged to the Raquet; Nick covered the rackets. All the rest is commentary.

  But not ordinary. A bit like Nora, Nick also came from a writing family. Gay Talese, a splendid and justly celebrated nonfiction writer, is his cousin. Nick’s mother and Gay’s mother were sisters, and even their fathers were first cousins, from the same Calabrian town. The cousins went their own ways in America—Talese to Philadelphia and then the Jersey Shore and Pileggi to Brooklyn—and they split also on politics. Talese veered right and Pileggi went—or remained—left, both men reflecting the split in the Italian-American community, where the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini was not universally despised. During World War II, first generation Italian-Americans had to face the anguish of fighting an army that, just some years earlier, had been their own.

  Nick and I had met in 1967. I was working for United Press International and he was working for the Associated Press. We represented competing wire services, and we were both sent to cover the showdown between the TV networks and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the union representing television performers. At stake was the telecast of the Academy Awards, scheduled for Monday, April 10. An anxious nation awaited the outcome of negotiations.

  Few things in life are as boring or tedious as covering labor negotiations—even those involving television. You don’t actually cover the negotiations. Instead, you hang around waiting for someone to tell you something. Leaks are not unknown, but news is made usually whenever a representative of management or labor—or a mediator—decides to talk to the press. The AFTRA negotiations were held at the Barclay Hotel in Manhattan, now the InterContinental. The most interesting thing about the assignment was watching the hookers stroll through the lobby. They looked like a million bucks, which judging by their appearance was not far from their yearly take.

  Nick had taken a room in the hotel. He was working on a freelance piece about Rome for Holiday magazine, and way before the phrase was in common usage, he made me an offer I could not refuse: In exchange for covering for him, he’d let me use his bathroom. A deal was made, a bond was forged. From time to time, I would venture out into the hallway where the press was gathered, check around for any tidbits, and return to Nick’s room, where I would sit and watch him type. I was content. My only competition was the AP, and its man was sitting in front of me writing an article about the glories of Rome.

  The way I met Nick was far less dramatic than the way I met Nora, but it left a lasting impression. He was the senior man, a seasoned reporter. I was his junior, still learning. I don’t know what I called him, I suppose Nick, but he called me “Kid.” Way into my seventies, he was still calling me Kid.

  * * *

  Journalists are like cops. The average person is familiar with what they do and is therefore free to criticize. But just as it takes a cop to know a cop, it takes a reporter to know a reporter—not only to know what news is and isn’t, but what constitutes a story, how it’s built, its ingredients, the G-force of deadlines, the demonic demands of editors, and the severe limitation of space in print or time in television (when Nick and I met, the Internet was not yet a factor).

  So journalists, like cops, hang together. They often avoid civilians because they weary of explaining what they do and why some story that has offended some reader had to be written the way it was. Or maybe not. Either way, it is gone and nothing can be done about it.

  Nora had been a journalist, a member of the club, and knew that within that club Nick was considered something special. Working general assignment for the AP meant that Nick was well known to other reporters—not to mention cops—and while he had never toiled for the tabloids himself, he covered the same stories they did. This is how his reputation spread.

  Nick was very good at what he did. He had very specific, quite specialized knowledge, which was about the mob. The romance of journalism has to do with the story behind the story. A newspaper prints the story. But it does not print everything because not everything can be proven or is in good taste. So the journalist knows things that the reader does not. The mob writer knows even more. He knows what the mob controls or influences, which for a time in New York City, was pretty much everything, including of course a good deal of politics. Nick knew these things.

  Nick was affable. Nick was genial. But Nick was not easy to know. He held himself at a remove. He watched. He observed. He studied. He did not talk about himself. He did not say that he had been a poet of sorts, winning the odd literary prize while at college (LIU), that he had written a novel (Blye, Private Eye), that he read interesting books voraciously, that he traveled with older, accomplished women who valued his comportment. He had been married to Sports Illustrated’s celebrated golf writer Sara Ballard, who was doing what only men had done before. Nick was accustomed to strong women.

  The same detachment that commended Nick to the cops commended him to Italian mobsters as well. Nick, of course, was Italian himself
and spoke their language, particularly their body language. The wiseguys had their attributes—love of family, loyalty to friends and neighborhood, all the Godfather stuff—and Nick recognized who they were and what they did. That was all right with the mobsters; Nick had his job, they had theirs.

  His breakthrough came with the book Wiseguy. It was the story of the mobster Henry Hill, who was squirreled away in the Federal Witness Protection Program when he opened up to Nick about his life in the mob. “Once he realized I was nonjudgmental about his life, he was unbelievably open and full of details,” Nick told the New York Times back in 1986, when Wiseguy was published.

  Some people only knew Nick as Nora’s husband. He was the guy who preceded her, dispensing cash to head waiters and such, like some sort of Manhattan Johnny Appleseed, and then sometimes took care of even more people on the way out. He was a promiscuous and generous tipper, a characteristic Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson lovingly portrayed at Nora’s memorial service. This was one of Nick’s jobs. He took care of Nora.

  But outside a small circle of people who saw him mostly as a spouse, Nick was known as a brilliant screenwriter and producer, a one-man idea shop, turning out proposals that wound up on the movie or TV screen. Nick was relentlessly self-effacing. His mob connections remained as confidential as any source more famous reporters had—Bob Woodward, for instance. The mob operated by the rules of omertà. So did Nick.

  * * *

  I vaguely knew about Henry Hill. I sort of knew when Nick was in Vegas, but not what he was doing there or, certainly, whom he was seeing. Nora, though, knew it all. Nick’s material was not Round Table stuff, no Parkerish witticisms from stone-cold killers. Still, Nora thrilled to it. She had a taste for the demimonde, and the denizens of that world, hardly literary, had an eye for her. They knew of her and her movies, and like any American, they were infatuated with Hollywood.