She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  Nora did not have much in the way of family—no aunts or uncles ever showed up at Thanksgiving, but her oldest sister and frequent writing partner, Delia, was usually there, along with her husband, Jerome Kass, yet another screenwriter and novelist. (He died in 2015.) Her youngest sister, Amy, a novelist and food blogger, lived in Los Angeles and had children of her own and, presumably, Thanksgiving chores as well. A middle sister, Hallie, lived in Massachusetts. She was oddly known as the sister who did not write and whose husband didn’t write, either, and who even took her husband’s name, Tauger. Yet she emerged in later life as Hallie Ephron, a mystery writer of some note and some notable success, and when I was seeking an assistant, Nora called to tell me I had already found one—Hallie’s daughter, Molly. She was, of course, hired.

  * * *

  Whatever Christmas was about for others, for Nora it was about just about everything she loved. Christmas was the opportunity to make people happy, to find just the right gift and show how much they were loved. Nora’s gift-giving was merely an extension of her dining room table—yet another way to entertain, to be a host, to spread pleasure. Alas, I was not on her gift list. I think she took my Scrooge-like antipathy toward Christmas seriously—more seriously than I did—and anyway much of the time I was in Washington and not able to attend her Christmas dinners.

  There were other Christmas parties, though. One was routinely held by Howard Stringer and his wife Jennifer Patterson in their Upper East Side town house. Later, these parties were moved to the Stringers’ upper Fifth Avenue place with its drop-dead view of the Central Park South skyline. These were Gershwin nights, or if you will Rodgers and Hart nights—magical Manhattan celebrations, something out of a movie, something that combined the New York Nora loved with the friends she loved with the success she’d had and, of course, Nick, Nick. Always and forever, Nick.

  Marvin Hamlisch, the composer and a friend of Stringer’s, worked the piano, sometimes singing his standards, sometimes nonsense tunes of his own invention, sometimes leading us in songs of the Christmas season. He was a funny, erudite man, a Broadway composer of classical training, an impish man who was always suppressing a gag.

  The Stringers would distribute song sheets—the usual Christmas stuff—and we would belt them out. Then would come what for me was the highlight of the evening. Nora would take a handheld mic and step to the piano. She had a sweet, innocent, voice, a bit girlish, and she would sing the little known introduction to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” including

  “There’s never been such a day / in Beverly Hills, L.A. . . .

  But it’s December the twenty-fourth / And I am longing to be up north . . .”

  The girl from Beverly Hills, L.A., gave the lyric authenticity. With a pause and an expression of immense satisfaction, Nora would lower the mic and we would all swing into the song.

  BeeBee Fenstermaker could sing.

  Bedeviled by ‘Bewitched’

  * * *

  Movies fail. Movies fail all the time, most of them swiftly forgotten except by cineastes and studio executives who seek any reason to drive down the salary demands of an actor or director. Nora’s movies failed, of course—maybe more than they succeeded. The triumph of Sleepless in Seattle was followed by Mixed Nuts, a Steve Martin vehicle which was an adaptation of a French comedy—a very dark comedy. It didn’t work.

  Next came Michael with John Travolta. Nora and Delia did the screenplay, and while the movie made money, it is not remembered as an Ephron film because there is indeed little of her in it. After that came another of her signature hits, You’ve Got Mail—and then things went off the rails. She coproduced and cowrote Hanging Up, a box office and critical failure. One review, in particular, is worth noting because it blamed Nora for the film’s deficiencies, even though she did not direct it. The critic, Emanuel Levy of the widely read industry weekly Variety, had liked some of Nora’s earlier work—he was kind to This Is My Life—but he came crashing down on Hanging Up as if he was settling a score. “Hanging Up,” he wrote, was “a shamelessly sappy” film “that bears the schmaltzy sensibility of Nora Ephron.”

  Nora was both mystified and hurt by such reviews. They went beyond merely commenting on the film and instead swung a roundhouse at her—in this case, as the cowriter of the screenplay. How Levy knew the “schmaltzy” stuff came from Nora and not from Delia—or, for that matter, the director Diane Keaton—is beyond me. In a way, though, it was a backhanded compliment and acknowledgment of her fame and power. Just as she came to be associated with When Harry Met Sally . . .—a movie she had not directed and a scene she had not fully written and a line that was contributed by another—she was taking the blame for a film that, once again, had been directed by someone else. (In fact, she had her own problems with the film.)

  Nora felt reviews such as this were personal. She wasn’t liked, she’d say, and there was nothing she could do about it. She’d throw up her hands in exasperation. She was mystified. She was hurt. It was painful to see.

  Worse was to come. Nora’s next film was another John Travolta vehicle, this one called Lucky Numbers. It was another attempt to veer from the allegedly “schmaltzy” to the dark side. But it went too dark and got miserable reviews. The shoot had gone remarkably well. The cast had a great time, hugely enjoying themselves. The movie was funny. Everyone was laughing. And so its critical reception felt like an ambush. Lucky Numbers cost an estimated $65 million to make. It took in $6 million.

  By the year 2000 Nora had made two outright bombs. Michael was an interlude, but it starred John Travolta only a year after he had done the immensely successful Get Shorty and two years after the even more successful Pulp Fiction. The latter revived his career, and some of that aura carried over to Michael. But Michael was where Nora’s movie career might well have ended. As a director, her career seemed dead in the water.

  * * *

  In 2003, Nora switched agents, going from Jim Wiatt of William Morris to Bryan Lourd of Creative Artists Agency. The move was a wrenching one for both of them, although harder on Wiatt for sure. He had been Sam Cohn’s man where Cohn dreaded to go, Hollywood. Wiatt was Nora’s guy—her agent, her friend—and even when he left Cohn and his agency (ICM) to go to William Morris (which became William Morris Endeavor), she stayed with him—managing to be represented by both Wiatt at one agency and Cohn at another.

  Both Wiatt and Lourd were immensely important agents, but Nora was in trouble and Lourd and his agency were perceived as more powerful than Wiatt and his agency. Nora wrote Wiatt and then met him at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. She told him she was leaving him for Lourd. This was both an emotional and clichéd moment. Agents get fired all the time, occasionally even for cause. Still, they were both overcome. She told him the decision was very tough to make. They held hands. They hugged each other. They vowed to remain friends. (Nora was godmother to one of Wiatt’s kids.) Nora had a new agent. She lost an old friend.

  As far as Hollywood was concerned, Nora was a great screenwriter but not necessarily a great director. And when Bewitched came along, offered by her longtime friend and Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, Nora seized the opportunity. Bewitched was not only a big payday but an opportunity for Nora to prove that Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail were her rule, not her exception. She was made the proverbial offer that could not be refused: a huge fee. She signed.

  * * *

  Bewitched had much going for it. It starred Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, both proven box office draws. Beyond that was its provenance. It had what Nora’s friend the producer Lynda Obst calls “preawareness.” The movie was based on the hugely successful television series that ran from 1964 to 1972 and at one time or another must have cumulatively employed half the actors and writers in Hollywood. Almost everyone knew of the series or had seen it. Not Nora, though. She had to watch segment after segment—an IQ leveler if there ever was one—while Mary Pat Walsh, an assistant, took notes so that their script would be true to the i
diosyncrasies of the TV show, lest its fans scream in protest.

  The TV series was about a witch who married an ordinary man and occasionally—once an episode, as it happened—used her supernatural powers to help him out. She does it by wiggling her nose, which, as luck and casting would have it, Nicole Kidman could do. The premise was silly—even mindless—and an artifact of a different era, the late 1950s, but it intrigued Nora, possibly because of its feminist—or antifeminist—themes and also, in her version, because it offered the chance to parody Hollywood. Three different screenwriters had taken a cut at the material and all had struck out.

  Nora and Delia went for number four. They knew something of the subject, or, if you will, the phenomenon, because they had grown up in an age when every wife was considered to be something of an adorable witch. Poof! She made dinner appear. Poof! She did breakfast. Poof! The bed got made and the kids got dressed and the TV repairman showed up and opened a physician’s bag of tubes.

  Nora used to mock that 1950s ideal of domestic bliss which was based entirely on the mythically cheerful servitude of housewives. Her favorite phrase—her virtual call to action, which she incorporated into Heartburn—was the seemingly innocent question “Where’s the butter?” It wasn’t just a simple question. It was a lifestyle with a question mark.

  Nora would take it and run with it: “Where does a man think the butter would be? The closet? The bedroom? Maybe the garage?” But in that era, all across the nation, wives would rise from the table, apologize for their ineptness, and say, “I’ll get it for you, dear.” Then they’d go to the refrigerator, which in the kitchen of my childhood was located right behind my father’s chair. But if my mother had not gotten the butter for him, if she had not made the food and set the table (after coming home from her job running the business office of a local hospital), my father would have sat in that chair until he was nothing but a skeleton, a bony hand holding an upturned fork.

  So Bewitched was an opportunity to return to the 1950s–1960s and do the era justice. It was also a chance to revisit one of Nora’s favorite movies, I Married a Witch. That 1942 charmer starred Veronica Lake and Fredric March, and the possibility of a remake had kicked around Hollywood for years. I heard Nora once mention it to Tom Hanks. He said that he, too, liked the movie. There it sat.

  Over the years, I had learned to defer to Nora. I understood that there were things I did not understand. I did not understand, for instance, what she saw in the property that became her play Lucky Guy, which, to my great relief, I was wrong about. I felt the same way about Bewitched. I had never seen the TV series, but I assumed Nora had. I assumed, moreover, that she had a firm and unerring grip on popular culture and saw deep meaning in what I thought was meaningless schlock. She used to discuss the characters from the Archie comics—Archie, Reggie, Betty, and Veronica (nobody cared about goofy Jughead Jones)—as if they were evocative of the real America, which someone like her, I figured, knew something about. (I, as a New Yorker, not only knew nothing, but I felt not the slightest nostalgia about my high school days.)

  It turned out, though, that I was not the only one who had doubts about Bewitched. As she was in the practice of doing, she sent the script to Steven Spielberg to ask him what he thought. Not much, he essentially said. “I didn’t tell her not to do it. [She may already have been committed.] I asked her how she was going to put herself into the movie. She said she would do it in the character of Samantha [the witch].

  “You can find Nora in everything she ever directed. I could not find her in this script. And as it turned out, there was less of Nora in Bewitched than in any of her other pictures.”

  The critics murdered her. As usual, some of the criticism seemed personal. “The artificiality of Bewitched is so exaggerated that it almost works in the movie’s favor for the first twenty minutes or so, before that heavy synthetic Ephron odor really sets in,” wrote Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. Others were less personal but no less scathing. The movie was universally disliked by the critics. Audiences agreed in surveys. Mostly, though, they just stayed away.

  So did actors. Nora wanted to move on to the property she originally called Stories About McAlary. No one wanted to do it. Leading man after leading man read the script and passed. McAlary was a chancy role to begin with—and Nora, it seemed, was not the director with whom to take a chance.

  * * *

  Coming on the heels of Judy Corman’s passing, the failure of Bewitched was cruelly crushing to Nora. She was sixty-four years old. She was a woman. She was, in short, an old woman (by Hollywood standards) whose two recent movies had been flops. She blamed herself. She had let down her cast. For almost any other director, it would have been time to collect awards, be recognized by the industry, do a lecture of two, and—before it was done for you—call it quits. Nora, however, was a writer. She would write.

  The Blessing of ‘Bewitched’

  * * *

  Something was happening. Bewitched had bombed, but nevertheless, Nora Ephron was becoming a cultural icon—a phenomenon, actually. Her core admirers were women, primarily but not exclusively middle-aged woman—or older. The explanations for that were many and obvious. After all, she had done the book on betrayal, Heartburn. She had written the manual, then done the movie. She had been betrayed, publicly and flamboyantly, and instead of hiding in shame or simply lying low, she had come roaring back with an eviscerating form of fiction which, of course, was the truth, the whole truth, and a bit more.

  But Heartburn was not the whole of it. There were the movies, of course, and the plays and the blogs and the columns in the New York Times—and, above all, the books. One in particular stuck a chord: I Feel Bad About My Neck. Nora published it in 2006, when she was sixty-five. The title essay is about aging. For a woman, that, not philandering mates, is the inevitable betrayal.

  “That’s when she became an icon for women,” said her longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb. “Until then everyone thought she’s funny, she’s brilliant, she’s this, she’s that. But that’s when women started to identify with her. Heartburn was admired. Neck was revered.

  Why? First of all, the title essay is pure Nora. It is funny. I have read it many times, and it still brings a smile to my face. When Nora says that you have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck, I smile—and so do you.

  Second, the essay is wise in a between-us-girls kind of way. It is about truth, a sad, lamentable truth, which is that a woman’s neck is a dead giveaway to her age, and that age, if it is over precisely forty-three, will announce itself with a neck that is sagging and mottled and . . . well, not youthful.

  There is another thing about this essay: It is not one bit different than having a conversation with Nora. It has the same timing and the same observant wit. It is really no different than the conversations she had with Christopher Lospalutto, her hairdresser, when, invariably buried in a script, she’d direct him to shape her hair so as to better to hide her neck.

  Nora never let me in on that little attempt at hairline prestidigitation, but we did talk a great deal about aging. It was, after all, what we both were doing—full-time, as it were—each day’s inspection in the mirror bringing further alarming discoveries.

  Aging is funny—until it isn’t. (It does not improve over time.) Aging has a kind of pratfall aspect to it—not just the morning aches and the evening insomnia—but the sheer surprise of it: How did we get here? Nora would recall her childhood and hearing her parents talk about not being able to sleep, and we children, would wonder how in the world that was possible. All you had to do was put your head down on the pillow. Close your eyes. There!

  She wore socks to bed. She’d mention that. She’d take half a sleeping pill. She’d mention that also. We would wonder how anyone our age could have an extramarital affair—we’d hear about such things—when you wore socks to bed or snored or kicked in your sleep because you took a statin just so you wouldn’t die of heart disease before you aw
oke. Where was eroticism? Where had it gone?

  She went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote the book and erupted in honesty about the travails of aging. The show was entitled “Great Women and Their Anti-Aging Secrets,” and the other guests were Diahann Carroll, Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Diane Sawyer (via tape), and Alfre Woodard. Oprah praised the book and then said, “I see you’re covering your neck, Nora.”

  That was Nora’s cue.

  “I am. I wore this. [A scarf.] I wore this just to show you what it’s like to go shopping when you’re older. I was not prepared for many things because nobody tells you. And here’s what I really wasn’t prepared for: sixty-two. You know what you get as a present for your sixty-second birthday? No one tells you this. A mustache.”

  And then came a cavalcade of candor.

  Her memory? Shot.

  Her neck? A mess.

  Her energy? Diminished.

  Her sex life? Not what it used to be.

  Her honesty? Coruscating.

  She repeated much of what she had written in the title essay of her book. She confronted the tendency to deny the dreadful effects of aging. She did this in a culture obsessed with youth and the antics of youth. The actress-singer Marlene Dietrich, to cite an extreme example, became a recluse in her early seventies and would not even allow herself to be filmed for the documentary Maximilian Schell did about her. (He used only her voice.)

  Nora, in a sense, was the other extreme. Yes, she had never been a famous sex symbol, and, yes, she was not an actress, but still she had a public persona, and, yes, she worked in Hollywood, where old was not venerated, and she appeared on television all the time. In the entertainment world, to be old and not dead was simply to be stubborn.