She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  “Women have to do a different thing to establish authority. Clint could say, ‘Just bring me the light, just do it.’ A simple sentence like that. ‘Just bring me the light. Just do it. Do what I ask.’ If a woman said that in just that same tone, just that same way, it would be soul-curdling for a crew.

  “The very first female director I saw on a set was Penny Marshall. The way that she did it, to not take anything away from the crew, to not give a direct command which is difficult for people to hear, she’d say, ‘Oh, I know this is a pain but can we just . . . Oh, I’m so sorry to ask this, but, oh my God, I forgot to ask you on the last take, can you just put the light in there?’ It was clearly a request. It was not a directive.

  “Nora did it in a different way. She would be funny and she would be soft. She’d say, ‘I think if we just had a little light on it, it could be perfect.’ Nora had a way of doing it that was completely charming, was feminine, and took nothing away from anybody’s manhood to do what she asked. She was good at it and was naturally diplomatic and graceful and understanding—and because her intelligence sussed out the situation—she devised a strategy to get what she wanted.”

  * * *

  In his telling, Mike Nichols created a little family when he did a movie. In his recollection, Bob Balaban remembered no such thing. Balaban had been flown down to Mexico for a small part in Catch-22. He was young, cash poor, and unknown. He would sit by himself in the commissary, sort of like high school where the popular kids take certain tables as a matter of (nearly) divine right. As Balaban sunk into a funk, Bob Newhart used him for an extended shtick. “Newhart would get up and say loud enough for everybody to hear, ‘Did you hear about Bob Balaban? He died.’ ”

  “They would go through this twenty-five-minute improv about ‘Poor Bob Balaban,” Lynn Grossman, Balaban’s wife, recalled. Bob would just be sitting there. It was very funny unless you were Bob.”

  Nora, who was the sole journalist allowed on the shoot, befriended Balaban. Along with his wife, they became lifelong friends.

  But—I hear Nora nagging—that is not the point of the story. The point of the story is that that sort of anomie—a Balaban on the verge—is exactly what Nora set out to avoid when she did her own movies. She not only mothered the cast, but when it came to the leading players—Hanks, Ryan, Wilson—she set up a mini-salon. Seattle is where, really, Tom and Rita and everyone else learned that wherever Nora might be, a round table was nearby.

  An Intervention

  * * *

  I was going to make this chapter about how Nora’s dinner parties took on great importance to people who were already important, but I am being reprimanded: Richard, it’s time to say something about the kids.

  Yes, of course—the children. Aside from her own, the children she had in mind, the ones who meant so much to her, were the kids of her friends. She always had time for them—not as an exasperating courtesy due their often important parents, but out of an almost incomprehensible urge to mentor, to mother, to listen and listen, and then to talk. She did not need to be asked—Nora, would you mind . . . ?—but she would offer her time, volunteer a lunch, and then say nothing about it. I, for one, knew nothing about her relationship with Calvin Trillin’s daughters or Spielberg’s kid until I began researching this book.

  I also did not know about Juanita. She was one of several underprivileged kids Nora corresponded with. Their names were provided by the Writers Guild Pen Pal project, run by Tom Fontana. The letters were written in 2010 and 2011. Here’s one of them:

  December 7, 2010.

  Dear Juanita:

  I’m happy to hear that you’re my Bookpal for the school year. When I was your age, all I did was read too, like you. I loved reading much more than watching television. My mother used to drive to a used bookstore in Los Angeles, where I grew up, and get us books that she’d grown up reading. So I read all sorts of classics, like The Little Princess and Anne of Green Gables. I still like to read them, and I have a shelf of children’s books in my house, some of which are the very books I grew up reading. A couple of them are so old, they’re practically falling apart. I also loved going to the public library. I used to ride there on my bike and come back with a basket full of books.

  One of my favorite books growing up was called Homer Price by Robert McCloskey, and whenever children come to visit, I like to read from it, especially from the chapter about the donut machine that wouldn’t stop making donuts. I always loved reading about food, especially sweets, so it’s no wonder I love food and cooking as much as I do.

  When my sons were growing up, I used to read to them, and they loved the poems of Shel Silverstein, which are really clever and funny.

  If you are a good writer, which you seem to be, you should think about being a writer someday. It’s a good job, and you can be just as successful at it as being a doctor.

  I hope you have happy holidays and write me back soon. Do you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah? Tell me about it.

  Best

  Here’s part of another:

  Dear Juanita:

  To answer your question, I am now working on a screenplay. Sometimes a screenplay becomes a movie, and sometimes it’s just a script that kicks around for a while and doesn’t get made. I have had both experiences. I’ve been lucky that a lot of my scripts have become movies, and because I am also a director, that helps. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of my movies. The most recent was called Julie & Julia and it starred Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. It was all about food, which you know is one of my favorite subjects. I wrote and directed two movies you might like—one is called Sleepless in Seattle, and the other is called You’ve Got Mail. They are both romantic comedies and I think you’d enjoy them.

  I also write books and plays, so I don’t have to count on the movie business, thankfully. I have three sisters and they’re all writers. My parents were writers, and they wanted us to be writers, and they got their wish.

  As for your question about what I celebrate, I celebrate Christmas—which is to say, I have a Christmas tree and Christmas dinner. I am not religious but I love Christmas. I’m sad I have to take the tree down this week, because it’s so pretty. We have a very weird tree that is hard to describe. It’s made of metal and it’s an antique and was used as a department store display, probably back in the 1940s. I bought it at an antique show. Anyway, because it’s not a live tree, you don’t have to take it down, so last year I decided to redecorate it. In January I decorated it with icicles and snowflakes. In February I decorated it with red ornaments for Valentine’s Day. I was all set for March—I was going to do birds, for the coming of spring—and then I realized I was getting a little nutsy, tree-wise, so I took it down.

  Anyway, write me soon and tell me what’s up with you.

  Your Pencilpal and friend

  * * *

  Sasha Spielberg was hardly an underprivileged kid, but Nora made time for her anyway. Starting about when she was five or six, Sasha Spielberg was permitted to cross Apaquogue Road in East Hampton to visit Nora. These visits continued for the next fifteen years or so and involved conversations lasting two or more hours. When Sasha was younger, an enticement was Nora’s lemon cookies, which she kept out on the kitchen counter, or the chocolate chip ones, which were kept in a cabinet. For Sasha, these were powerful lures because her parents maintained a draconian no-dessert policy, except on weekends. Then came Sweet Saturdays.

  Nora made tea for Sasha and whoever of her little friends were visiting the Spielbergs. These teas, too, were regular affairs over which Nora presided. When they were alone, Sasha told Nora her problems. At a very young age, she came to rely on Nora’s judgment, and that did not change one whit as the problems became more complicated—more adult. Nora became Sasha’s mentor and her confidante. “She was a sister, she was a mother, she was a friend,” Sasha said. “She embodied every person in my life in one.”

  On occasion, Nick would pop into the kitchen. His appearance shocked little Sasha. S
he had come to think of Nora as being just Nora—not part of a couple, but her big and wonderful friend. This sense of possession, or having sole and unabridged title, was not simply the product of childish, somewhat magical thinking. Adults felt similarly. Nora’s ability to concentrate on the person in front of her, to make even a casual friend feel singularly important, was a pronounced trait.

  I focus on Sasha for another reason: time. Nora spent a lot of time with her, and at no age—not six or seven and not seventeen or eighteen—did Sasha feel that Nora was stealing glances at the clock. And yet always—always, always, always—Nora was on deadline for something. Always, she was writing or producing or going into production as a director. Always, too, she was a wife and a mother. She had her own kids.

  * * *

  I sometimes still talk to Nora. I conjure her and wonder about questions that occur to me now but did not occur to me when she was alive. Sasha Spielberg was not the only girl who came to rely on Nora. There were other kids—some who will not talk about their relationship—but none of them were boys. There were, as I have mentioned, some young men, writers all, but they did not come over for tea or coffee or talk about their love life.

  In fact, Nora rarely wrote about men. Her movies were about couples or, as in the case of This Is My Life and Silkwood, about a woman. Similarly, her first two plays—Imaginary Friends and Love, Loss, and What I Wore—were exclusively about women, with the latter being really about girls. Only Lucky Guy was about a man, and while the unproduced Higgins and Beech was ostensibly about both a woman and a man, it is the woman who is the more vivid character—both excitable and palpably sexual—while the man is customarily brave, sardonic, and stoical. Lucky Guy was her only project to explore what it’s like to be a guy.

  And yet at the center of her life were guys—her two boys and Nick. She split custody of her children with Carl, so they were sometimes in Washington and sometimes in New York, and then more and more often in New York, where, after a while, Carl had moved. She and Nick took the boys to ball games—Nora became a boring Mets fan—and Nick very early on took Max fishing in Alaska, a journey of pure joy for the kid.

  But while Nora and I had friends whose homes were dominated by the presence of children—a riot of toys scattered around, the children themselves ricocheting off walls and furniture, eyes focused always on the next tumble or spill—this was not in the least Nora’s house. She had kids. Understood. But they were not the whole of her life. Understood. Other women were mothers first and then whatever else they once had been or wanted to be again. Not Nora. As it had been with her mother before her, she was both mother and writer. Each had its place.

  Meg Ryan, when she first came to see Nora’s East Hampton home, was shocked to see it was so “girlie.” It was the home of a woman, a very feminine woman, a woman whose tastes were white and frilly, conventional in that way, but garnished with idiosyncratic touches—Nick’s Diane Arbus photos; kitschy snow globes; an antique weather vane; a collection of small, brittle teacups. Nora was a girlie girl. She loved being one, but she had none of her own.

  When she wasn’t in East Hampton with her parents, Sasha would send Nora her writings for criticism and suggestions. She wrote short stories and, later, screenplays, and Nora would send back detailed criticism, not something like “good job” but notes about character and plotting. They stayed in touch by email. This is Nora’s final one to Sasha:

  1. congratulations on your b.a. who spoke at your graduation? did you find anything meaningful out?

  2. where are you?

  3. where are you going to live?

  4. will you have an apartment of your own so I can send you something or are you moving back in to one of the thousands of options available to you?

  5. or are you moving in with max? breaking up with max?

  6. i would love to read your screenplay.

  It was June 6, 2012. Nora said nothing about being in the hospital.

  She died twenty days later.

  Lavender’s Blue

  * * *

  To understand Nora Ephron, to appreciate why so many people loved her and sensed a compelling sweetness and even shyness in her, you have to know something about the movie So Dear to My Heart. It was a children’s movie, released by Disney in 1948, when Nora and I were seven years old. It was about a black lamb that gets rejected by its mother. I’m not sure I ever saw the movie, although I assume Nora did. But we both knew a song from it—a radio staple sung by Burl Ives that was a sanitized version of a seventeenth-century English folk tune originally about sex and drinking.

  “Lavender’s green, diddle, diddle” got Disneyfied into “Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly, lavender’s green.” As a child, I never knew what that meant. As an adult, I still don’t. Still, it is one of my favorite songs. One night at dinner, Nora told me it was one of hers, too. I was struck by that and we sang it, sotto voce, together.

  In the Burl Ives rendition, “Lavender’s Blue” is a sweetly innocent tune, childish, almost infantile. To admit to a fondness for it suggests a Technicolor-hued romanticism and, more than that, a childhood that has not quit. For me, the song has lingered almost seventy years, and it invokes, when I think about it, short pants and polo shirts and chocolate milk and my Dick Tracy watch. Nora would recall different artifacts, of course—maybe a dress, maybe jacks, maybe a doll whose eyes rolled back when it was tilted.

  “I love to dance, dilly, dilly, I love to sing / When I am queen, dilly, dilly, / You’ll be my king / Who told me so, dilly, dilly, who told me so? / I told myself dilly, dilly, I told me so.”

  That’s the last stanza. You might argue that nothing about it evokes Nora—certainly not that bit about loving to dance. She was a renowned cynic, adept at throwing a cloth napkin at the fool across the table who had not only said something wrong but insisted it wasn’t. She was urbane in a film noir sort of way, not a doll or a babe or anyone’s arm candy, but smart and wise to the ways of the world. She had a corresponding low opinion of men and thought that even the nicest of them were sexual marauders. She always had her eye out for the exception and she found it, I am certain, in Nick. She was not, in the argot of forties movies, a tough dame, but she was a swell broad.

  And yet, if you asked me to sum up Nora in a song—an odd request, I grant you—I would sing “Lavender’s Blue.” This soft, nonsensical number comes to mind because it is so like her and yet, one might think, so unlikely of her. As almost always, both are true, but there was a softness to Nora, a sweetness, an endearing vulnerability that some friends occasionally saw and others just guessed at and that I knew to be there. The song said it all.

  The “Nora Ephron movies” that she was famed for making, movies “with messages of toxic female sentimentality,” as one critic put it in a review of the play Imaginary Friends—the layers of romance and schmaltz; the sound track with Jimmy Durante singing “You Made Me Love You” in You’ve Got Mail or Durante twice in Sleepless in Seattle; the ending on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, an homage to An Affair to Remember; the appeal to nostalgia; the goopy but effective romanticism of it all—got criticized over and over again, and not only in reviews of Nora’s own movies but in reviews of movies made by others, when they were deemed excessively sentimental: a Nora Ephron ending, they would call it. And she would be stung.

  Yet, just as Nora discovered that Erich Segal was not a pandering fraud, so too were her movies an authentic representation of who she was. They were concocted, sure. They were tidily written, certainly. But the reason they worked—the reason she knew they would—was that they worked for her.

  “Lavender’s Blue” is not the only song I associate with Nora. The other is “White Christmas,” the Irving Berlin perennial. Oddly enough, the song both separates us and bring us closer. Nora loved Christmas.

  I come from a family that not only did not celebrate Christmas but actively resisted it. This was not the case with the Ephron family. They embraced the holiday. They saw it a
s it had become, a onetime religious holiday that, if anything, had been transformed over the years by their Beverly Hills neighbors—Jewish songwriters and movie producers—into the loveliest of all holidays, as secular as a hug. It was seemingly created to Nora’s specifications, and I don’t think even she could have improved on it.

  Christmas was about a meal—actually several of them. But the one that counted was the one Nora and Nick gave. I was not a usual attendee, living in Washington a good deal of the time and affecting a bah-humbug attitude toward things Yule. The meal was not just an opportunity for Nora to cook, but an explication of what amounted to her philosophy of entertaining: Always make the meal yourself. Strictly speaking, it was not necessary in a city like New York to cook everything—a pig on a spit could probably be delivered in a half hour. But Nora cooked it all. For her, the meal was an expression of love. The Christmas food was a Christmas gift.

  Nora also loved Thanksgiving. It, too, was about family and friends, but it was not a season and was, when you came right down to it, about a single meal. Nora’s meal was as unvarying as any concocted by some Midwestern grandmother. She served turkey, of course, and cranberries and all the usual stuff, but also the universally dreaded oyster stuffing. This white, oleaginous blob—oysters seemingly stuck in some cheesy muck like sabertooths in the La Brea Tar Pits—was nobody’s favorite, but Nora never abandoned it. I would tell you what it tasted like, only I managed never to taste it. It would sit, rebuked, at the near end of a round table in the kitchen, the last (or the first) stop of a buffet that began and ended, as far as I was concerned, with dark meat turkey. I would circle the table, sneaking past the oyster stuffing year after year, until Nora caught me. She insisted I at least try it. I plopped a dollop on my plate and made for the dining room. I never touched the stuff.