She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  * * *

  If Nora had some qualms about Hanks, he also had some about her. For one thing, she scared him—virtually a universal experience before falling in love with her (yet another universal experience). Hanks saw Nora as the very personification of the sophisticated New Yorker—“a lifelong Manhattanite, privy to all things Gotham, John Cheever and the New Yorker and things like that.” His California sense of inferiority, of not knowing one subway line from the other or a bagel from a bialy, came on like a rush, and it only abated when Nora mentioned that she had grown up in Beverly Hills. Hanks greeted a 90210 childhood as if it were Dorothy’s Kansas farm. What mattered was that it was not New York.

  “I didn’t realize that she had grown up just down the street from the Beverly Hills Hotel. That was astounding.”

  And while Nora might have been a New York sophisticate, she was nevertheless a filmmaking neophyte. Hanks was not. He had done his time. He knew his craft. He knew more than a bit about directing, too. He had ideas about filming and casting.

  “I thought I was a hotshot and I was supposed to have opinions and supposed to carry weight,” he said. He described himself when he first met with Nora as “persnickety in the course of the meeting” because he was very nervous, and in addition, he had a very basic concern that now brings a chuckle. He would play the widowed father of a young boy. “I didn’t want the kid to have better lines than me. I didn’t want to play the pussy.”

  Nora and Tom had subsequent meetings, and they were occasionally contentious. Hanks weighed in on casting decisions, which wasn’t in his purview at all. Nora listened. She was “incredibly gracious,” clearly biding her time until Hanks came to realize that she knew precisely what she was doing. Certainly that became clear at the end of the first week of filming when Nora fired the cute kid that Hanks had worried might get the better lines. The boy froze in front of the camera. Over the weekend, he was disappeared.

  The firing of the kid certainly got everyone’s attention, but it was hardly something Nora did casually. She was bothered about it and mentioned it to several people. In fact, the treatment of children in films was something that bothered her in general. We discussed the awkwardness of casting a child who, say, was supposed to be homely, or the fat kid who the other kids bully. I expected her to say something like, well, that’s part of the business, which is how journalists distance themselves from the sometimes innocent victims of their stories, but she was having none of it. It was still troubling.

  * * *

  In a way, Hanks was the odd man out on the set of Sleepless in Seattle. He had worked with Meg Ryan before, but never with Nora. Meg Ryan had worked with them both—with Hanks on a previous film and with Nora, who had been the writer of When Harry Met Sally . . . Rob Reiner had directed that one, and so he was responsible for the scene that is forever associated with that movie and with Ryan herself: the faked orgasm.

  The setup is simple: Ryan and Billy Crystal are eating in Katz’s, the storied Lower Manhattan delicatessen, when Sally asserts that women often fake orgasms, and their lovers not only don’t know it but take credit for the orgasms. Harry is disbelieving, whereupon Sally goes into orgasm mode, eventually slapping the table over and over again and exclaiming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Harry is both befuddled and embarrassed. For a while, he has no idea what’s happening, but he starts to catch on just as the store’s other customers become riveted by the orgiastic sounds coming from Sally.

  As written, the scene was limited to Sally merely saying that women fake orgasms and Harry expressing disbelief. Ryan had a better idea. She felt that her character had to be funnier, but the humor had to be physical. “She doesn’t necessarily have punch lines in that script, but she’s behaviorally funny. It came out of understanding that,” Ryan said.

  The scene has numerous quick cuts to other bewildered customers, one of whom is Estelle Reiner, Rob’s mother, a former actress and cabaret singer. A waiter is ready to take her order. With a glance at the orgasmic Ryan, she says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” It’s become one of the great iconic lines of American cinema, up there with Casablanca’s “Round up the usual suspects.” It was explosively funny. But it was not written by Nora. It was suggested by Billy Crystal.

  In the inevitable ranking of almost everything, the line is number 33 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time, along with “We’ll always have Paris” and other gems. It is the only one on the list, however, that is not spoken by a main character. For Estelle Reiner, that—aside from Rob Reiner himself—was her sole contribution to the film. The scene is now lauded as a comedic gem and considered not in the least controversial or smutty. Yet that was not always the case. Airlines edited it out of their in-flight showings and some audiences simply did not get it. Nora reported on the phone to me that when the scene was shown to a Las Vegas convention of movie distributors, the men in the room did not react at all. They didn’t get it.

  The women, however, did. They laughed, and their laughter became infectious until, one by one, the men joined in. It was not clear to Nora whether the women had, in effect, given the men permission to laugh, or whether the men were being told that something up on the screen was funny and they had better laugh or look stupid. By the time Nora told me about the distributors, the movie was already in release and widely known.

  “You know, men fake it, too,” I told Nora.

  That stopped her.

  I was in Washington and she was either in New York or Los Angeles, but I could feel her perplexity coming through the phone.

  “Men fake it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Men fake orgasms?”

  “No, not orgasms,” I said. “Listening. They pretend to listen.”

  The response was instantaneous—a hoot of laughter and then, “Write it.”

  And so I did. I killed a column I had already submitted for the weekend magazine and replaced it with one based on When Harry Met Sally . . . My column was not about how women fooled men but about how men faked listening to women. It was a total put-down of the self-involved man, which took about as long to write as it did to type. I read it to Nora over the phone. She approved, and I submitted it to my editor (a woman), who also approved, and she submitted it to her editor (a woman), who gleefully tore up my previous column and substituted the new one. I braced for the applause.

  Instead, I was vigorously denounced as a male chauvinist pig. A fellow Washington Post columnist, a woman of unimpeachable feminist credentials, pilloried me for purportedly saying women were not worth listening to. I was mystified. Nora was not. She said that’s why she left Washington.

  * * *

  The orgasm scene became bigger than the movie it came from. It gets mentioned all the time, and countless parodies have been done of it—testament to its ubiquity and testament also to how big and iconic a figure Nora had become. When she died, the scene was shown over and over again on television, and I doubt if more than a few people knew that she had not directed the movie or that the line was not hers or that acting it out was Meg Ryan’s idea.

  In the mind of the public, When Harry Met Sally . . . became a Nora Ephron film. This happened through the sheer force of her personality—how she was able to put her stamp on a film that was not hers. She did not do this deliberately, and Rob’s only public complaint was to insist that he—and presumably not me—was Harry, but when the publicity interviews were over, Nora had taken the picture away from its stars and its director.

  Eighty-six the Kid

  * * *

  Back in 1968, Nora had a “naïve” question for Mike Nichols: How do you direct a movie?

  “I just held my nose and jumped in,” he told her.

  Nora did not exactly jump in—she had studied at Nichols’s feet—but she had not attended a film school or worked as an assistant director. In addition to having almost nothing in the way of credentials, she was this rarity in the film business—a female dire
ctor. There have never been very many of them—and there were even fewer when Nora was starting out than there are today. The causes are several—including, of course, plain old sexism and the belief that the job is just too physical, too demanding, too much like being a military commander, for a woman to pull off. Whatever the case, women have a harder time of it in Hollywood than do men.

  Nora was hardly among the first female directors. Ida Lupino, who broke into the business as an actress and, really, remained one throughout her directorial career, made some pretty good movies, particularly The Hitch-Hiker, a film noir semi-classic. Still, she is remembered more for being an early female director than for any particular movie she directed.

  Lee Grant was another female film director who had started as an actress. If she is remembered as a director, it is as a cautionary tale. In 1997, a project her husband had been nursing, a story about a washed-up hockey player, got green-lighted. She would direct and the very hot Bruce Willis would star. The movie set up shop in Wilmington, Delaware, and almost immediately things started to go wrong. The film’s editor left for another job. Willis was not getting into his part. He didn’t like his hair (the hairstylist had also left). He didn’t like the way he looked on screen. He didn’t, in short, like the way Grant was directing.

  He called his wife, the actress Demi Moore, and asked her to come to Delaware to watch some scenes. In Grant’s memoir, I Said Yes to Everything, she told what happened next.

  “Do you think it’s sexy?” Willis asked Moore. “Do you think I’m sexy?”

  “No,” Demi said, “I don’t.”

  “And that, folks, was that,” Grant wrote. She was fired.

  Willis abandoned the movie. A $28 million picture—$18 million already gone—went down the drain. Grant was devastated, and although she thought Willis had overreacted, she understood. Willis said she had lost control. He needed a stronger hand.

  “The problem when you are a star, when the money rests on you as an actor, is that your freedom to fail is gone,” she wrote.

  Would something like that have happened to a male director? Maybe. But the question is unavoidable because what Willis was demanding had “masculine” written all over it. Whatever the case, Grant’s description of what a star risks in committing to a picture explains why they are so understandably cautious in approaching a project. The studio was in for well over $30 million, but Willis was risking his reputation. The studio could make back its money, but Willis could never get back his time or the damage to his career from a failure. He cut his losses—and went on to great success.

  Nora was an oddity in one other way. She recognized that the script for Sleepless in Seattle was initially made workable not by her, but by a writer named David S. Ward (who won an Oscar for The Sting). He was one of several writers who took a whack at the project, and it was he who put his finger on what had gone wrong. In the earlier drafts, the Tom Hanks character had called a radio shrink on his own and confessed a loneliness and an aching longing for his dead wife. Ward changed that. He made the kid, Hanks’s son, call the station and then Hanks, mortified, takes over. Ward recognized that the audience might feel that a man who calls a radio shrink is not a worthy hero. Nora recognized that the change saved the script. She fought for Ward to get a writing credit. He did.

  * * *

  Naturally enough, when Nora showed up in Seattle, all eyes were on her. Was she tough enough? Was she disciplined? Did she know what she was doing? Jim Wiatt, along with Sam Cohn, had set up the project, and what had clinched it—indeed what had gotten Nora in the door—was not her work as a director, but her brilliance as a screenwriter and her considerable charm. She was hard to say no to.

  Sleepless, like Silkwood, was a woman’s production. Nora was writing and directing. Delia was cowriting and Lynda Obst was a producer. All over Hollywood, women seemed to be coming into their own as studio heads—Sherry Lansing at Paramount Pictures, Stacey Snider at Universal, Dawn Steel and later Amy Pascal at Columbia/Sony. Lower down were many female producers of all kinds. Yet there were very few female directors. Maybe the studio heads were women, but the corporate heads were men.

  On a couple of occasions, I went to the set to see Nora direct. She was clearly in command and completely at ease. Directing was her natural element; she did it on a daily basis, telling everyone in her life what to do and often how to do it. But with movies her role was official and her wisdom certified by the size of her name in the titles. She casually exercised her authority, sometimes with an almost childish delight. As she assumed control over Sleepless in Seattle, she ran into her friend, the art director Walter Bernard. Along with Milton Glaser, he had designed and redesigned many American magazines and newspapers (Time, the Washington Post, etc.). She asked him if he had ever done movie titles. He said no, but that hardly dissuaded Nora. She knew Bernard’s work from New York magazine and hired him on the spot.

  “Can you really do that?” he asked, somewhat startled.

  “I can do anything I want,” she replied gleefully. It was fun being a director.

  * * *

  Filming of Sleepless in Seattle began on a Wednesday. By the weekend, Nora had viewed three sets of dailies—and she did not like what she saw. It was then that she both impressed and terrified the members of the cast by firing the kid. She was protecting the movie.

  If Hanks was impressed, Rita Wilson, a member of the cast as well as Hanks’s wife, was apprehensive. She later appeared in yet another of Nora’s films, Mixed Nuts, and worried if she was going to be the next “kid.” “I kept thinking I was going to get fired,” she said. “I was shocked that I made it through the whole thing.”

  By then, Rita and Nora had become close friends. They had met initially at a party in Los Angeles when Rita approached Nora, introduced herself, and said she was a fan. Later, Rita and Tom leased an apartment in the Apthorp for the New York filming of The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which starred Tom and featured Rita. The two families got closer still. Years later, Tom and Rita temporarily moved into a second apartment Nick and Nora maintained in their Upper East Side building, when the Hankses had to move out of their own. Many a night, Nora would call and offer dinner. In Nora, Rita was finding just the person she had been looking for.

  “I really think that Nora was the closest thing I’ve ever had to having a mentor,” Rita said. “I always wanted that, someone who would see something in you that other people didn’t see. She really did that, because she cast me in Mixed Nuts, which was a big studio picture.”

  Yes, but while Nora handed out bit parts to old friends (I appear ever so briefly in You’ve Got Mail) friendship was no guarantee of getting an important part. She made Rita, for one, jump through the standard hoops. “I had to do a lot of auditions. I had to do screen tests. I had to wait for two or three months.”

  In the end, Rita got the part, and in the end, Mixed Nuts bombed. It had been a $15 million or so movie, with a money-in-the-bank cast (Steve Martin, among others), and it just flopped, taking in less than $7 million. Martin irrationally blamed himself, but Nora was the director. Her name was above the title. Mixed Nuts hurt.

  * * *

  Nora rehearsed her movies as if they were plays. For interior scenes, she would put down tape to simulate walls and set down fake couches where the real ones would go. Her scenes could be up to eight pages long and sometimes be deceptively complicated. One in You’ve Got Mail took days to rehearse. It’s the one where Meg Ryan has a cold and is repeatedly sneezing.

  “It took at least a full day to shoot,” Hanks said. “It was all very specifically plotted out. No other directors did that. It wasn’t like rehearsing with anyone else. Rehearsing in other movies may be nothing more than sitting around talking about the script.”

  Steven Spielberg observed that Nora wrote the way Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan naturally talked. So in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, their natural bantering was incorporated into the script. Sometimes that sort of thing can harm a movie be
cause a rhythm established off-camera takes too firm a hold when the camera is rolling. “But Nora’s scenes just played like natural conversations punctuated by humorous bits that Meg certainly could deliver, and that’s sort of my bread and butter,” Hanks said.

  So Hanks was given license to improvise. He had a problem with a scene in the script where his character complies with the pleas of his kid and stays home rather than go away for the weekend with a woman. Hanks knew better.

  “I said, Nora, there’s not a man in the world who is not going to go off and get laid for the first time in years simply because his son doesn’t want him to. And she said, ‘Well, you should say that then.’ ”

  And he did.

  * * *

  Meryl Streep, who starred in three of Nora’s movies, saw Nora as a female director who directed as a woman. “Nora never lost sight of the power of being a girl,” Streep said. “On the set, and how you command attention, there’s a bunch of different ways to do it as a director. Sometimes, like with Mike [Nichols], it’s through humor and his wit that he establishes himself. He doesn’t even have to work to do it, he’s just a little bit ahead of everybody, and smarter, funnier, everything, so we defer to him.

  “Clint Eastwood [who directed Streep in The Bridges of Madison County] would do it by virtue of who he was and the persona he brought to the largely male crew, so he never ever had to raise his voice. In fact, the quieter he would get, the more on their toes everyone became.