She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  By the late 1950s, the Mafia was going from an obscure collection of (mostly) Sicilian thugs to recognition-cum-celebration as the nation’s premier crime syndicate. In 1972, the release of The Godfather clinched the mob’s hold over the American imagination—and clinched the movie’s hold over the mob’s imagination. The wiseguys saw themselves up on the screen, huge and hugely romanticized. They started to use Godfather quotes like “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” in their daily life and played the movie’s theme music at their weddings, baptisms, and funerals.

  “It made our life seem honorable,” Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, said. Gravano was in the business of killing people.

  The Italian mob became a metaphor for American life—capitalism, family, masculinity, and, finally, a cowboys-and-Indians tale in which the good guys were the bad guys. When that happened, Nick was well placed. He knew the prosecutors, the lawyers, the lawmen, and the lawbreakers. Wiseguy became a best seller in 1986. The producer Irwin Winkler read it, thought it could make a great movie, and brought it to Martin Scorsese to direct. It was called Goodfellas, and it became a classic.

  The script for Goodfellas was written both by Nick and Scorsese. Some of it, though, was ad-libbed on the set. Joe Pesci, who played the psychopathic Tommy DeVito, injected the word “fuck” into all of his scenes. (The word occurred 393 times in the movie itself, placing Goodfellas in the top ten of all movies in that regard—along with Casino, the film Nick did next for Scorsese. Again, the culprit was Pesci.) At the premiere, Nick paced nervously as if waiting to be admonished for his dialogue. Instead, screenwriters now pay him homage—not just for Goodfellas but also for Casino. They are masterpieces of structure and storytelling.

  * * *

  It was 1983 when Nora and Nick began a love affair that never ended. They had noticed each other out of the corner of their eyes, often at Elaine’s. They traveled in somewhat the same circles, although Nora, with Heartburn just published and Silkwood in theaters, was the more glamorous of the two. Washington was behind her—Washington and its huffy outrage over Heartburn—and instead she had New York, where writers were not supposed to be influential, but merely brilliant. Nora was the latter, and New York, a cold city of warm people, cosseted her.

  A book has been done on Elaine’s, and Frederick Seidel wrote a poem to the place. “Remembering Elaine’s” is studded with names and lurid with cigarette smoke, and there’s even a reference to Elaine Kaufman herself, “the woman who weighed hundreds of pounds.”

  “The fat lady’s” is what some people called the place, and it was to the fat lady’s one night that Nick and a pal repaired in a sudden spur-of-the-bachelor’s moment—and there, finally, was Nora. They talked and they made a date for the next night, drinks only because Nora was dining with Ken and Amanda Auletta and Howard and Jennifer Stringer. Individually, they each knew Nick, and so when Nora, still tingling a bit from the night before, told Amanda about Nick, she was told to bring him along.

  That dinner was a typical Nora event, even though it was not, strictly speaking, Nora’s event. While it might seem that she collected famous and successful people—and she most certainly did—she was actually an amazing talent scout who had met some of the famous well before they were famous. Howard Stringer was one. He and Nora had met years before when, obviously morose over the breakup of a relationship, she approached him at a party and got him talking. They talked for a very long time, Nora focused on Howard throughout, drawing him out of his gloom and leaving an indelible memory. “I was completely bowled over by her and she just cheered me up immensely,” Howard said.

  A bit later, Howard would meet Nick. The two of them worked on a CBS documentary on Italian Americans which became one on the Mafia. Howard was the producer, Nick the consultant. Many years later, Howard became the president of CBS and then CEO of the Sony Corp. In that capacity, he supplemented Nora’s fee for Sleepless in Seattle and overcame some studio opposition to get Julie & Julia made.

  Ken Auletta became the New Yorker’s media writer and the author of eleven books, but when he and Nora met he was writing for the Village Voice. (He would later write political columns for both the New York Daily News and the New York Post. Amanda had met Ken when they both worked for the New York City Off-Track Betting Authority. Ken was so admired by Nora that some felt he paved the way for the even more Italian, Nick. Amanda, who encouraged the affair, went on to become a phenomenally successful and important literary agent.

  Jennifer Kinmond Patterson (Mrs. Howard Stringer) was the only non-media person at dinner that night. She was a dermatologist, soon to have her own Manhattan practice.

  The dinner was held at an Upper East Side Italian restaurant that Ken had booked. The food was forgettable but not what was happening to Nick and Nora. They were falling in love.

  “You could feel it,” Auletta remembers.

  Nick had a place downtown, where, as Nora put it, he lived out of a Chinese takeout container. Within a month, he had moved into Nora’s place in the Apthorp. In the summer, they took a rental in the Hamptons. The next summer they would have moved into Nora’s newly purchased East Hampton house, except that it burned down—not quite to the ground, but the damage was extensive. They rented yet again, this time a massive Tudor-style house set up on a berm, not too far from Nora’s charred dream house, which was located on the most Hampton of all corners, the intersection of Lily Pond Lane and Apaquogue Road.

  In Nora’s hands, catastrophe became opportunity. She had the dream house restored to her specifications. With the exception of the kitchen floor, which was done in black-and-white tiles, the other floors were painted white, which is what she did in all of her apartments. I used to joke that someday when people came across a New York apartment with white floors, they would exclaim “An Ephron!” and its value would instantly increase. Her response, as to all such witticisms directed to her peculiarities, was a weak patronizing smile. As with her fervent allegiance to the round table, she stuck with what worked.

  She scoured much of the known world for quilts and colorful throw pillows with jaunty Early American motifs. The guest bedroom I sometimes occupied felt as if it has just been vacated by Betsy Ross, and the bed itself was buried under an avalanche of little pillows that I would study at bedtime with great intensity, trying to remember what went where so I could make the bed in the morning. (This was before smartphone cameras.)

  A helpful insurance company contributed to the restoration, Nick chipped in some of his movie riches, and Nora provided the rest. The result was a happy place, pre–Martha Stewart but very much in her style, to which was later added a mudroom and an auxiliary kitchen, into which was placed . . . the mangle.

  The mangle was the perfect Nora device. It not only was useful, but it was exotic, in a thoroughly boring way. After all, it was nothing but a hotel-style rotary presser used for ironing sheets. But Nora was very excited about her mangle—both because of its oxymoronic name and because it was useful. Nora showed it off the way some people do pictures of their kids at camp—although, at first, the mangle was more interesting. Unlike Nora’s first food processor, however, it must have proved its worth. It remained in the mudroom.

  Nora and Nick planted a sapling at the side of the house. It is now confidently established. She put her round dinner table in a corner of the kitchen and surrounded it with swell guests—sometimes the Spielbergs from across the street, sometimes the Bradlees from across the other street, sometimes the Hankses, Meg Ryan and her then husband Dennis Quaid, the Aulettas, on occasion her sister Delia and her husband, the movie and television writer Jerome Kass—and less frequently, her youngest sister, Amy, who lived on the faraway West Coast.

  It is antithetical to who Nora was to drop the names of her weekend or dinner guests. She would never have done something like that herself. On the contrary, I never knew in advance who was going to be at dinner—but I always knew it was going to be someone interesting. One time a Harvard law profe
ssor. One time another screenwriter. One time an important agent or an actor or a novelist or a director or a chef or an artist. So, for many summers, I would start out from Washington with a great sense of anticipation. Somewhere around five hours into the ride—say, Southampton—I would enter Nora’s ambit. I would either be staying with her and Nick, or I would have rented nearby, and I would be free of Washington, and its incessant talk of politics and government, and into this other place which was not exactly New York and was not Los Angeles, either, but was a mélange of the two, with just the occasional dash of Washington thrown in.

  * * *

  Sometime in March of 1987, Nora called: Come to a dinner party she was having in New York. It would be on the 28th, which was a Saturday. I turned her down. My wife was then the executive producer of Meet the Press, which broadcast on Sunday morning. There were no early morning or late night trains or planes from New York to Washington.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  “Nick and I are getting married,” she said. “It’s a surprise. You two are the only ones who know.”

  Actually, by the time we got in the door, everyone knew. Nora’s sons, brimming with excitement, greeted the guests with the announcement “They’re getting married!”

  Nora wore a polka-dotty thing she later came to regret and Nick, as I recall, wore an air of supreme calm. In due course, Richard A. Brown appeared. He was later to become the district attorney of Queens County, but that night he was still a judge who had earlier married Ken and Amanda. Without any attempted Navaho nonsense, he married Nora and Nick. Afterward, Barbara and I piled into a limo (authorized by NBC’s storied bureau chief, Tim Russert) and were driven to Washington. We arrived a bit before dawn. It had been a delicious night. Including of course the food. For her own wedding, Nora had cooked.

  I Am Not and Never Have Been Harry

  * * *

  I am not Harry. I need to say that because for a time—and continuing past Nora’s death—it was sometimes rumored that the Harry character in When Harry Met Sally . . . was based on me. It was never clear to me when Nora and I had supposedly had an affair—before she married Carl, after she married Carl, after she left Carl, or some other time entirely—but it never happened. (Richard, I love you, but not in that way, I hear her say. Then we both laugh.)

  It was true, however, that Nora and I had discussed the premise of When Harry Met Sally . . . , which is whether a man and a woman can be friends—“just friends,” as the expression goes. It is also true that Sally Quinn and I had whipped up a four-page movie treatment about a relationship that went from friendly to sexual and had presented it to Nora at a lunch in Washington—and that Nora had based “Sally” on Sally Quinn. But it is also true that the idea for the movie originated with Rob Reiner, who would wind up directing When Harry Met Sally . . . .

  Reiner, who had divorced the actress-director Penny Marshall in 1981, was going through the vicissitudes of dating. Along with his producing partner, Andy Scheinman, he had many stories to tell about the single life. Nora was all ears, and eventually they decided on a pitch that asked a question: Can sex be avoided in a friendly but intimate male-female relationship? The answer in the movie is no. The man (Billy Crystal) and the woman (Meg Ryan) even get married. My answer would have been just the opposite. Sex can be avoided—especially, as I hear Nora whispering—after marriage.

  If one hand washed the other, then Nora was my other hand. There was nary a toast I made that she did not either approve or improve. She often contributed to my columns—especially the weekend one, which I tried to make humorous. After a while, I could not figure out where I left off and she began—or the other way around. Even in the book Heartburn, when she described her husband as capable of having sex with a venetian blind, I think I said it first. Even so, I’m not sure I know what it means.

  In the same book, she referred to Mark’s brief first marriage to a woman named Kimberly—“the first Jewish Kimberly,” she wrote. My first marriage had been brief. My wife was named Kimberly. She was Jewish and she had, just as in Heartburn, locked herself in the bathroom (not a bedroom) just before our wedding reception (not the wedding itself).

  In Heartburn, Nora says that Kimberly was stingy—so stingy “she once blew up the apartment and most of what was in it while making brandy out of old cherry pits.” Neither is true. It was a turkey that caught fire in the oven as guests were coming for dinner. Cherry pits, I concede, is more colorful.

  Just as she debriefed Rob Reiner on the folkways of being a male on the hunt, she did the same with me. She seemed genuinely shocked or surprised at some of my tales, and particularly enjoyed one where, after a night of having too much to drink, I awoke next to a woman with no idea of her name or, for that matter, what had happened to her eyebrows. In a panic, I slipped into the living room, found her purse, and rummaged through it for her wallet. I greeted her when she awoke with the name on her (obviously purloined) driver’s license.

  She flew into a rage: “Maria? Maria? Why do you call me Maria?”

  In minutes, she was gone—one moment an object of considerable lust, the next a durable anecdote.

  * * *

  For Nora, Sleepless in Seattle was a stunning achievement. She had directed only one previous movie, This Is My Life, in 1992, which had starred Julie Kavner as a budding comedian who survives by pitching cosmetics at Macy’s. The film may have been early Nora, but nothing about it suggests an amateur or a dilettante. For it, Nora assembled what could be called the Nora Ephron Repertory Company. It included her frequent cowriter, her sister Delia, and a bit part for her friend Diane Sokolow And for those in the know, the film contained an inside joke—the paper-chewing agent played by Bill Murray. That was Sam Cohn.

  This Is My Life got respectable reviews, without the almost standard criticism of a novice director. On the contrary, Nora was praised for her direction and character development. Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, not only liked the picture but was on the money when he guessed that Nora was “possibly drawing from issues in her own life.” What Ebert knew, of course, was that Nora, as did the Kavner character, had two kids. What he might not have known was that she had spent nights waiting for Dan Greenburg and Avery Corman to go on at the the Improv. She knew about club dates.

  This Is My Life was both a success and a failure. It got made, which was achievement enough for a first-timer, and it was about a woman, which in itself was something, and the woman was not some buttery-voiced looker who defined happiness as the love of a man, but a non-looker with a voice suggesting horseradish. At the box office, the movie did meager business and Nora thought she knew why. She told Sally Quinn that the Kavner character was too Jewish. (Kavner was best known then for playing Brenda Morgenstern in the TV series Rhoda.)

  Nora pulled back. From there on in, her leading ladies were going to be the likes of Meg Ryan and Meryl Streep—wonderful actors both, but not likely to be found ordering smoked fish at Barney Greengrass (“The Sturgeon King”). Even when she again returned to film in New York, her characters were named Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly and they were played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

  Similar sounding names, as ethnically blanched as any in an Andy Hardy flick, occur in When Harry Met Sally . . . . Meg Ryan is Sally Albright (Alice Arlen’s maiden name) and Billy Crystal, a genuine product of Long Island (yet!), is Harry Burns. He tries to play a gentile, but underneath that wry smile is the aftertaste of stuffed cabbage.

  Not many people saw This Is My Life, but two who did not only liked it a lot but proved instrumental in Nora’s career. They were Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks. Rita was already a fan of Nora’s writing, and when This Is My Life opened, she suggested she and Tom take it in. They not only liked the movie, but Tom—watching with the practiced eye of an actor—saw a director in command of her medium. In one scene, Kavner and her two daughters move from Queens to Manhattan and Nora tracks their car.

  “It was a geographically accurate mo
vie montage,” Hanks said. “They got on the 59th Street Bridge and they drove up First Avenue. They went across the Park at 79th Street or whatever it was. That always knocked me out.” (In Sleepless in Seattle, Hanks’s character is driven across the same bridge to his rendezvous with Meg Ryan at the top of the Empire State Building.)

  So, when Sleepless In Seattle was offered to him, Tom was primed. He (and Rita) liked what they had seen from Nora and liked what they had read from Nora. Nora and Tom met at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was 1993.

  By then, Hanks had hit it big with Big and, before that, Splash. He had been nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Big and was on his way to the Oscar itself the next year for his portrayal of an AIDS victim in Philadelphia. Hanks was both a journeyman actor and a movie star. He had been in the business since doing plays in high school. In college, he studied theater. He was the consummate professional, at the top of his game and lacking just one thing: edge. Tom Hanks was a nice guy. You could not imagine him slapping a woman or, as Jimmy Cagney famously did in The Public Enemy, pushing half a grapefruit into Mae Clark’s face. It was this quality that troubled Nora. It did not trouble Mike Medavoy.

  Medavoy was the head of TriStar, the studio behind the picture. He had seen Hanks and Meg Ryan work together in the not very successful Joe Versus the Volcano. The movie did not work, but he thought the pairing of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks did. He had also seen a French movie called Toute une vie or, as it was retitled in English, And Now My Love. It was a Claude Lelouch vehicle, and it involved a man and a woman who, although in love, meet only at the end of the picture. Medavoy was charmed by the concept, and Nora made it happen in her rewrite of Sleepless in Seattle. Sam Baldwin and Annie Reed do not meet until the very end of the movie, when they come together on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building.