She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  “I was suddenly playing on an Olympic team,” O’Brien said. “I mean before I even read anything, there’s Nora Ephron, Mike Nichols, and Marvin Hamlisch [who wrote the music]. What am I going to say? No? So obviously I thought, sure, put me in, Coach.”

  It took O’Brien a beat or two to realize that he had stepped into Nichols’s shoes. “I came in late to this project and obviously it had its genesis with Mike, I think.”

  O’Brien, predictably, was dazzled by Nora and later moved by her generosity. When he and a friend bought a weekend place they playfully called Imaginary Farms, Nora gave him cocktail napkins with “Imaginary Farms” embossed on them and then took him to the antique fair and made him buy a quilt. “And she said mysteriously something that I really never understood. She said ‘All the colors you need in the house are right there in the quilt.’ It was so Nora.”

  After O’Brien’s country house was finished—after Imaginary Friends had closed—Nora and Nick drove up for the weekend. She had made a blueberry pie, and then, along with O’Brien, she cooked dinner. This was her gift to the director who felt he had failed her. It was her way of telling him he hadn’t. An unwritten rule of the theater was to move on from a flop. Nora, however, reached back.

  “We had wonderful time and it was a great reconciliation,” O’Brien said.

  * * *

  Jack O’Brien had won three Tony Awards and been nominated for seven more. His is not a household name, but in the theater world he is very well-known and immensely respected. Still, when he met Nora and entered her world, he reacted like he had just gotten off the bus from Saginaw, Michigan, his hometown.

  “It was an interesting rite of passage for me, because it was the first time I had been invited into that room [Nora’s place],” he said. “I have had success and I have had various kinds of success, but I never landed there before. Not that room. Suddenly I would go to a dinner party and there is Meryl Streep, Barbara Walters, and all of those people. It’s pretty heady stuff.”

  Imaginary Friends was a minor failure. Marvin Hamlisch teamed with the lyricist Craig Carnelia to provide songs, but the critics didn’t much like them and found them beside the point. The play had worked best in San Diego, where it opened at the Old Globe Theater. But the move to the larger stage of Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater hurt it. Ben Brantley, the critic for the New York Times (and virtually the only game in town), had a particular problem with the play: He didn’t get the point.

  Neither, I think, did Nora. “The point” was always her goal, and getting there was her self-imposed obligation. In Imaginary Friends, however, she drowned in too many points—the unreliability of memory, the jealousy of high-powered women, the bitterness of an ugly woman (no matter what her gifts), the arcane antagonism between Trotskyites and Stalinists, and, finally, the tension between the obligation to the truth and the simultaneous obligation to tell a good story.

  “I believed in the truth,” McCarthy says.

  “I believed in the story,” Hellman says.

  Imaginary Friends ran for seventy-two performances, and I suppose that’s a failure. I didn’t see it that way then and I don’t see it that way now. The material was rich, beguiling, and Nora could not pass it by. She was caricatured as a writer of Hollywoody comedies with syrupy endings, but here she had tackled some big ideas and the complicated personas of two celebrated intellectuals. She enthusiastically waded into a theatrical effort with a briar patch of historical exposition to master. And she did it.

  Hellman and McCarthy were dead by the time the play opened in 2002, but they remained a living presence in theatrical and literary New York, fresh in the memories of people who still mattered. Nora’s failure, if indeed she failed, was in her reluctance to say that the liar was the more interesting character and the lies made for a more interesting life.

  But possibly her first encounter with Hellman, that New York Times interview from 1973, was the vaunted Rosebud of this play. In it, Hellman referred to the difficulties of writing about living people. “It’s hard to tell the truth about the living,” she said. “It’s hard even to know it.” And then as if to say, Here, Nora, here is your play, she confessed that she was, in one telling respect, a jealous person.

  “Dashiell Hammett used to say I had the meanest jealousy of all. I had no jealousy of work. No jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn’t know how to do it.”

  Hello Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!

  * * *

  FADE IN ON:

  A ROOMFUL OF MEN

  Men at desks. Men as far as the eye can see. We’re in:

  INT: CITY ROOM OF THE NEW YORK HERALD-TRIBUNE—DAY

  It’s 1950. We hear the rattling of Underwoods, like a forest full of mechanical crickets. We track through the city . . . and finally we come to rest on:

  THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM.

  Thus begins Higgins and Beech, a script Nora wrote with Alice Arlen that was dear to her heart but which she could never get made. Marguerite Higgins was the once-famous war correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune. Keyes Beech was a war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Higgins had won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Korean War. Beech had won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the same war. They were competitors. They were lovers. It was a movie.

  Nora offered the part of Higgins to Meg Ryan, but she turned it down. (A decision she later came to regret.) George Clooney took a look at the part of Beech, but, as did other possible leading men, he realized that the star was really Higgins.

  Besides casting, the script had other difficulties. It was about the Korean War, the war that seemed nothing but a World War II afterthought and a prelude to Vietnam. It required an exotic locale for shooting, if not Korea than somewhere that could pass for it. (Australia was mentioned.) In all, this would be an expensive movie about a dying industry (newspapers) and two already-dead newspapers, a forgotten war, and characters that no one still cared about. Sony Pictures, where Nora had a contract, was not charmed, and Kate Capshaw, who read the script in England on location with her husband, told Nora it was great but that she was then watching rushes of the greatest war movie ever made. It was her husband Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg had done his war.

  * * *

  It’s hard to say what the essential, the quintessential, Nora Ephron movie would be. Surely, most people would pick You’ve Got Mail or Sleepless in Seattle or even When Harry Met Sally . . . Others would choose her final film, Julie & Julia, which combined themes from her own life—a preoccupation with food, the delights of mature love, and, of course, the thrill of working yet again with Meryl Streep. None of those would be wrong.

  And yet for me it is the one that never got made. It is the one about the lone woman in the city room and what newspapering was once like and how it was possible to be a reporter and have your name and face plastered on newspaper delivery trucks as they rumbled out at night and coursed through the city. Nora was a newspaper girl, and she admitted that time and time again. She might have quit the New York Post, but she never quite walked out the door.

  So it should have been no surprise—and yet it was—that Nora returned to newspapers and a newspaperman for her final project. It was the play Lucky Guy, which had been written as a movie and which started for her on the morning after Christmas 1998. As usual, she went directly to the newspapers. She read fast, moving quickly through the Times until she reached the obituary page. There, she stopped, ripped out an item, affixed a note to it, and dropped it into her office outbox for her assistant, J.J. Sacha, to pick up when he returned from his Christmas vacation. Mike McAlary, the celebrated and notorious newspaper columnist, had died of colon cancer the day before. He was only forty-one.

  McAlary had been a titanic journalism presence in New York. He wrote a reporting column—lots of legwork, lots of attitude—and he wrote in the style of his tabloid elders, particularly Jimmy Breslin, who, along with the quite different
Murray Kempton, was one of his journalistic heroes.

  At one time or another McAlary had worked for all the New York tabloids—the Post, the Daily News, and Newsday out on Long Island—jumping from one to another, and sometimes back again, each time for bigger bucks. In the end, he was a gargantuanly well-paid newspaperman, making upward of $350,000 a year in an industry where almost no one except top editors made more than $100,000.

  McAlary was not only paid by newspapers, he was covered by them. He was a brawler and a drinker and a womanizer. He barely survived a predawn car accident in which he was probably impaired, and in 1995 he had to retract a series of columns in which he claimed that a purported rape victim had fabricated the incident to publicize a feminist rally. (He had been misled.) Later in his career, he left a chemotherapy session to report the story of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant whom cops severely beat and then sodomized with a broomstick in a Brooklyn police station. For that, he won the Pulitzer Prize. A year later he died.

  McAlary was a much beloved and much reviled figure. He was enormously brave, sometimes foolishly fearless, but it was his courage and working-class affect that commended him to the cops and explains why they trusted him. One time he called his lawyer, Eddie Hayes, from a riot in Brooklyn. Hayes, who was essentially the house counsel to the New York tabloid types and was also close to the cops, pleaded with McAlary to get out. “I’m going to get wood,” McAlary screamed into the phone, using the newspaper term for the biggest headline of all. “I’m going to get page one.”

  “Michael, you’re going to get killed,” Hayes replied. “Forget about the wood, you’re not going to get out of there alive. The policemen aren’t going in there. They’re afraid to go in.”

  “Eddie,” McAlary said, “I’m going to get wood.”

  McAlary was the sort of journalist who made the story happen. He attacked it. He created it. He didn’t just cover it. These characteristics made him into that rare enough figure—a man among men. Other men liked him, admired him. He was one of the guys or, in the words of Tom Hanks, he was “a great hang.” He was the very personification of the hard-drinking newspaperman, usually Irish in the New York manifestation, a figure out of the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, which since its opening in 1928 had been made into several movies, including the 1940 classic His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. There is nary a newspaperman (or -woman) who has seen that film and not winced from recognition and shuddered with envy. Hecht and MacArthur got some things wrong—but not the frenetic excitement of newspapering.

  * * *

  Mike McAlary was not, in any way, an updated version of Maggie Higgins, but his story did put Nora back into her beloved city room. She set to work doing what any reporter would do—she read the clips and then did the legwork. What she found, if she hadn’t already known it, was that McAlary’s colleagues and pals were protective of him. The McAlary they knew had glaring faults, but he was both a gifted journalist and a gifted friend. In his circle—mostly Irish with working-class roots—loyalty and generosity were greatly cherished. McAlary was the personification of both. No one was going to talk trash about Mike.

  As a columnist myself, I both resented and envied my big city brethren. In New York, local columnists were widely read and an institutionalized part of the urban culture. Washington, which was a Sunbelt city that just happened to be located in the East, had no such tradition. In New York, local columnists were stars. I thought some of them were mere showboats. McAlary was one.

  My consternation over Nora’s interest in McAlary, however, was nothing compared to Tom Hanks’s. He not only didn’t appreciate McAlary, he plain out didn’t like him. Nora initially developed the script with Hanks in mind. She had an ongoing collaborative relationship with him—a constant exchange of ideas and concepts. Her script did not get a good reception. Hanks told her he didn’t much like tabloid columnists to begin with—he found them “scummy”—and McAlary was an exception only in that he was scummier than most—“a big jerk.”

  Nora persevered. Bryan Lourd, her agent, shopped the script to his clients. Sean Penn, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, Daniel Craig, and others said that while they were eager to work with Nora, not on this one, thanks. Nora wanted so much to do it that she even was willing for someone else to direct. Still, no takers. Lucky Guy needed a lucky break.

  * * *

  Just as McAlary had come back from career purgatory to win the Pulitzer with his columns on Abner Louima, so Nora’s story about him got another shot. The catalyst for that turnaround was an Englishman-turned-American named Colin Callender. He had once been head of films for HBO, where Nora’s script had come and gone, but by the winter of 2008 he was an independent producer of plays as well as movies. As a New York resident, he knew something about McAlary. As a resident also of the Long Island community of Bellport, he knew somewhat more. Mike McAlary had been his neighbor. Mike McAlary had been his friend. Callender called Nora.

  Nora started to revise, to write and rewrite, to think “play” rather than “movie.” She had written Imaginary Friends and, along with her sister Delia, the delightful Love, Loss, and What I Wore. She knew what needed to be done. In relatively little time, Lucky Guy emerged, adapted for the stage. Callender liked what he saw. So did Mike Nichols. A reading was scheduled for May 26, 2010. Hugh Jackman would play McAlary.

  On 42nd Street that day in May, the actors—all volunteers—sat at a very long table. The audience consisted of maybe twenty people, including Mike Nichols, who had directed the morning’s rehearsal. We all sat about three or four feet from the actors.

  Jackman took his seat. By then, he had made more than twenty movies and appeared—mostly starred—in eight Broadway plays. His performance in the Broadway version of The Boy from Oz (2003–2004) earned him a Tony Award for best leading actor in a musical. He could dance, he could sing, and he could certainly act. That day he would also cry—huge, Aussie-sized sobs—as he muscled through McAlary’s last lines:

  “I have lived the life I dreamed about, but there’s so much more I wanted to do. I want to dance at my daughter’s wedding. I want to see my son Ryan graduate from college. I want to walk old and gray on the beach with my wife. . . .”

  By then, Jackman could hardly get the words out. His body convulsed, he gulped for air.

  “I know I am unworthy” he continued. “But please forgive me if I don’t protest this Pulitzer Prize. This is a mistake I can live with.”

  A moment later, the reading was over. Jackman, spent, composed himself. The actors rose, happy, even buoyant. It had been a good reading, a sweet theatrical moment. I was ecstatic, so happy for Nora. They play was nearly perfect. She asked for “notes”—the term used for criticism or observations. Later that night, I emailed her one, mostly because I thought I had to. I believed Lucky Guy was ready for Broadway.

  Nichols, though, thought otherwise. It turned out he had many notes and he felt that the play had not quite come together. There would be other table readings—one in London with John Hamm as McAlary—and a final one with an always apprehensive and cautious Hanks. Over time, the play was rewritten, revised, nipped, and tucked, a process paused for a reading and then resumed almost the moment it was over.

  But as Nora worked, discarding other projects in a fierce determination to see this play mounted on Broadway, the cancer was biding its time. She rewrote a script called Lost in Austen but passed up the chance to direct it in England, preferring both to stay close to her doctors and to concentrate on Lucky Guy. She knocked off a script for a Reese Witherspoon project about the 1950s-era singer Peggy Lee, but had neither the heart nor the time to direct it. She worked on her Huffington Post blog and, except for clandestine visits to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for monthly infusions, kept up appearances and a daunting schedule.

  The cancer was right on time. The clock had been irrevocably set about six years earlier. Adamantly, I repeatedly white-lied my insist
ence that fate could be cheated, and Nora, with a “mother knows best” look, would respond with an indulgent smile. On occasion, she would dangle the phrase “If I live long enough,” letting it trail off into silence, as if she had broken her own code of omertà. She was in a race she would lose. The cancer was determined to bring down her curtain before she could raise the one on Lucky Guy.

  Emails in the Night

  * * *

  Nora hovered. I would talk to her by day, but at night, often while I was asleep, she could confer by email with Mona. They had much in common—a love of food, a knowledge of cooking, an eye for the nice things to wear, and some of the same friends from the movie business where Mona for a time had worked. But their bond was the terrible and, for Nora, the unspeakable.

  Nora and Mona became fast friends, maybe best friends. Both women had sisters (Mona had a brother as well), but those were complicated relationships. Nora and Mona’s was easier, more direct. They were similar in some ways—a compelling energy, an eagerness to laugh, a sharp social eye, and a deep layer of self-confidence masking an even deeper level of insecurity.

  And they both had cancer. But just as Nora did not choose the McAlary story because she, too, was a dying writer, so, too, she did not choose Mona as an intimate because they both were sick. In a short while, though, that turned out to be the case—“our true bond,” Nora said to Mona. They had this horrible thing in common, but they were, as all the dying are, alone with their pain, their fear, and, some of the time, their rage.

  Nick and I comforted, arranged for cars, escorted to doctors’ appointments and lab tests and in and out of hospitals, but there were times when I—I am speaking now just for me—failed. And when that happened, Mona would email Nora and relate how I had screwed up her schedule or doses of medicine—eleven different ones per day and, after a while, injections as well—and how sometimes I could not read the notes I kept, a log of the dosage and the time taken, illegible entries made in a half-asleep state, struggling for alertness after I had been awakened by moaning or the tectonic shivering caused by a spiking fever that would send us hurtling to the emergency room.