She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  The time. The dosage. I had to note it all. But I was afflicted with a wandering handwriting, the result of a pesky learning disability that I had short-circuited by moving to the typewriter as early as the eighth grade. Now this trivial thing, this nothing handicap, so low on the spectrum as to be a shrug, was threatening the life of this remarkable woman—and she was tattling on me to Nora.

  “Ri-i-i-i-i-chard,” Nora would say on the phone, my name elongated and her voice elevated to the register of rebuke. Her go-to phrase would come next: “Just let me say . . .” Then came a rush of directives, orders, recommendations, names of people to see, clinics, doctors, places discovered on the Internet, cures related by friends about friends. Her foot would come down: Hire a nurse. (Mona didn’t want one.) Then came the scolding. I had to pay attention. Really pay attention. Take careful notes. Make Mona feel secure.

  Yes, yes, I would say. Nora always had scant sympathy for my learning disability. She once sharply rebuked me because I could not remember her phone number—this after twenty years or so of calling it once or twice a week.

  I knew that Mona and Nora were talking behind my back—talking only occasionally, actually, usually emailing. In the middle of the night, their messages would go zipping across the East Side of Manhattan. They would both be up, armed with iPads, or sometimes Mona would get out of bed and clamber down the hallway to the den and use the computer there. I could hear the clicking of the keys, and I would sometimes learn about these insomnia-fueled exchanges from Nora, who then, in her coquettish drill sergeant manner, would rattle off instructions. She was part scold and part buddy and totally my lovable friend.

  From the moment Mona got sick, Nora took over. Mona had a daughter who was a physician in Colorado, and a son who lived downtown, and access to the best doctors. None of that mattered to Nora. She appointed herself chief resident, the second opinion to any opinion, the doctor who oversaw the doctors.

  * * *

  Mona had been misdiagnosed with diverticulitis, which had diabolically masked the cancer. She had been in and out of hospitals—NYU, Lenox Hill, and ultimately, New York Hospital—until, finally, surgery was scheduled. A massive tumor was found.

  I instantly called Nora. She rushed to the hospital. Nick took longer. He stopped to bring sandwiches. The both stayed for hours.

  Nora went home and attacked the Internet. She researched Mona’s cancer. She recommended oncologists. She forwarded the names of other women who had ovarian cancer whom we might contact. She urged me to call Jerome Groopman, a physician on the faculty of Harvard and the extraordinary medical writer for the New Yorker. (So did his New Yorker editor, David Remnick.) I balked. I did not know Groopman. I did not even know that he was part of Nora’s medical team—in some ways, its CEO. I would not call him. I placed him in this firmament of stars that Nora had called in or, through Nora, someone else had recommended. She was open to all possibilities. When the talent manager Sandy Gallin got the renowned new age guru Deepak Chopra to call me, Nora said, “Who knows? He’s done some remarkable things.”

  Mona and I had an understanding: No quack cures. No going to Mexico or some such place for some Hail Mary treatment. No extract of figs or total blood transfusion, no miracle cure—the miracle being that desperate cancer sufferers kept using it even though death swiftly followed. No doctor in Pittsburgh who saved the life of someone’s aunt. None of these.

  And then Groopman called me, and as he was apparently doing for Nora, he read the charts from distant Cambridge. He conferred with the oncologist and steadied me when I needed steadying, when I didn’t know what to say to Mona and felt I had to say something. Everywhere I turned, Nora or her surrogates were there—on the phone or the Internet. I was grateful. I was in awe. Nora was dying. Mona was dying. The dying took care of the dying.

  * * *

  Mona’s grand Fifth Avenue apartment looked out on the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From one window you could see down Fifth Avenue and the Central Park South skyline. After Mona got sick and it was difficult for her to leave the apartment, Nick and Nora would sometimes come over for dinner, often bearing discs of the latest movies—an industry perk.

  On New Year’s Eve during that time, after first having dinner at Steve Martin’s on Central Park West, Nick and Nora would cross the Park and join us. Mona would serve caviar and champagne—caviar from E.A.T. on Madison Avenue, immense dollops of it, with toast points and potato skins, sour cream, chives, chopped egg whites, and grated onions. Maybe too much. What the hell, it tasted great.

  At midnight, fireworks would explode over the park, huge, happy, bursts of light. Once again, it was the four of us—and twinkling Manhattan out the window. We loved one another and we loved New York, but the two women were sick, one obviously, the other not. New Year’s Eve was special for Nora; she included it in two of her movies, notably When Harry Met Sally . . . , but also Mixed Nuts because it met most of her standards for romanticism. But those nights, like the tears of fireworks extinguishing as they dropped, were coming to an end.

  * * *

  Most of the time that Nora was sick, Mona was sick, too. Nora was not sick like Mona. She was not repeatedly hospitalized and she did not undergo two serious surgeries, but when Mona lamented her plight—the loss of energy, the constant pain, the discomfort, the mugging of her dignity—Nora said she understood. This was 2010, when they both had about two years to live and Nora, secretly and without any drama, was undergoing chemotherapy every four weeks.

  Nora never specifically mentioned the chemo to me, although maybe she did to Mona. If I was reluctant to probe, she was just as reluctant to get into detail. She communicated with shrugs and sentence fragments—“You know” and such—and so I mostly steered clear. Still, Nora would pop up to New York Hospital following her session at Memorial Sloan Kettering across the street. Mona often had room 242—large and bright, with sunlight bouncing off the river. It had a couch which backed up against the huge south-facing window, a table with some chairs, two recliners—and, near the doorway, an alcove which I used as an office. About 4 p.m. daily, tea was served in a common sitting area.

  The fourteenth floor of New York Hospital’s Greenberg Wing was fairly new and, for a hospital, downright opulent. From time to time, rooms were cleared out to accommodate some Middle Eastern potentate, and once the entire floor was taken by the king of Saudi Arabia. (All the nurses, most of them women, were replaced by Filipino men.) When Nora finally moved into room 242, her neighbors were David Rockefeller and Jean Kennedy Smith, John F. Kennedy’s last surviving sibling.

  In my presence, Nora never talked about her chemo and what it entailed. Even at Memorial Sloan Kettering, she refused to use the term “chemo.” She called it Vidaza, which was its official designation: “I’m here for my Vidaza,” she’d announce.

  In her visits to Mona, Nora feigned nonchalance about her own treatment. Her goal was to make Mona feel better. She was visiting in her roles as chief medical officer, chief morale officer, and town crier. She related what was going on, who was sleeping with whom—less and less, with everyone growing older, as it turned out—and the usual mélange of politics and showbiz news.

  Nora suffered. She suffered and she wrote. She suffered and took her girlfriends to lunch. She suffered and she worried about her kids and what would happen to them. She went on a book tour for I Remember Nothing, which she dedicated to Mona and me. (The book arrived one night by messenger. I looked, mystified. It was not even signed. I handed it to Mona. Minutes later there was a scream. Mona had found the dedication. Within a day, she must have ordered a hundred copies.)

  Nora worried about bedbugs in the hotels where she stayed. She examined the bedding and she tried not to put her luggage on the floor, where, she had been told, the bugs lurked. Once, she found a dark spot on the blanket which turned out, upon very intense examination, to be a dark spot on the blanket.

  Bedbugs were then her obsession de jour. Before that it had been radiation from cell phon
es or overhead transmission wires—or, for that matter and always, cancer. Her condition remained a secret. She said nothing to no one, attempting to contain her cancer so it became as small a part of her life as possible. She would not give it its due.

  For a time, prednisone inflated her face. Once, she had to leave the Geffen boat under mysterious circumstances. Another time her arm inexplicably ballooned and she spent time in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in L.A.—the only time, Spielberg recalled, that she asked him for a favor. (She had had difficulty getting a room.)

  All the time she emailed Mona, affirming her friendship, making plans. It was odd then and remains odd in retrospect: She was going to die before Mona—June instead of December—and Mona, with Groopman holding one arm, her son Ari holding the other, and fatigue demanding her attention, bravely attended Nora’s memorial service. Until just a month before, Nora had seemed the healthy one, the eternal one, the caregiver and not the caretaker, so that when her birthday approached, May 19, Mona made plans for dinner. She emailed Nora: Sunday the 20th or Monday the 21st?

  “Monday,” Nora replied.

  On Monday, early, Nora canceled. She had a cold, she said. But Mona was wise to her. A cold would not stop Nora. She emailed Nora. This had to be bad.

  Nora was in the hospital.

  The Leukemia Ward

  * * *

  As far as most people were concerned, Nora just dropped out of sight, as if she had been kidnapped or placed in a witness protection program. With very few exceptions, no one knew where she was. For a while, she maintained an email presence, even a phone call or two, but soon that ceased, too. She was on the seventh floor of New York Hospital. It was for leukemia patients.

  Nora was in bed much of the time, but she was not bedridden. She could get around, and when she did, she noticed that rooms that were occupied one day were vacant the next, the patient silently removed in a protocol of closed doors, hushed instructions—a soundless departure to the elevator and down to the morgue, with its huge, forbidding, refrigerator.

  Nora of course went right to work. She and Delia set up shop on a small round table. They were writing a TV pilot for the producer Scott Rudin. It was called George & Martha. Delia sat at the table and worked on a laptop. Nora sat up in bed. The two turned out a snappy, jolly script that was very much to Rudin’s liking. As far as he knew—as far as he could tell—Nora was fine. The script was sound. A deal with HBO was being negotiated. Rudin knew that Nora had gone into the hospital, but he did not know the true reason. She had offered him a lie, something about a blood cleansing that she did annually. It was nothing. She’d be out in a week. Then she went silent.

  At first, Rudin suspected nothing. But then the week passed and he heard nothing from Nora. She and Rudin had not been in the habit of telephoning each other—emails sufficed—and for a time the emails kept coming. When they stopped, Rudin began to worry. He is famously impatient, a man who wore out his assistants, who awoke to his emails, went to sleep to his emails, and must have slept fitfully, knowing emails were either on the way or were then arriving. Rudin wondered what was going on or, to put it another way, what was going wrong.

  Rudin called J.J., who said there was nothing to worry about (“I thought, ‘Oh, you just gave me a reason to worry.’ ”), and then he called Mike Nichols, who, like almost everyone, was in the dark. David Geffen, too, was in the hunt. He kept calling Nora, but his calls were not returned. “I thought she was upset with me,” he said. Nora emailed him, saying she would call soon. She never did.

  * * *

  At the hospital, a debate was in progress: Should the world be told? I said yes. I argued that leukemia was not some sort of social disease—nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, I insisted, it could be beaten. Nora seemed unpersuaded, but I could not stay to press my case. My mother had just turned one hundred. It was a milestone she never wanted to reach. She was dying. I left the discussion and flew off to be with her in Newton, Massachusetts.

  Almost to the very end, Pearl Cohen was alert. She took an interest in Nora, whom she loved and who loved her in return. Once when Nora was wrapping up a speech to a full house at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, she squinted into the lights, recognized my mother in the audience, and dashed down an aisle to give her a hug. My mother was a small woman, then in her nineties, and Nora lifted her in the air. In some ways, my mother never came down.

  My mother died June 13, 2012, and I rushed back to New York—to Mona, who was sick at home, and to Nora, who was dying in the hospital. As soon as I could, I went to the hospital. I was an accomplished, nonstop liar, a totally counterfeit cheerleader, always assuring and reassuring, almost convincing myself that I could, with just the right pitch of my voice, some additional torque and the switched-on intensity that I brought to Mona, keep Nora’s death at bay. I steeled myself to enter the room, prepared to go into my sunshiny act, but the moment I got inside the door, Nora leaped from the bed and engulfed me. I was stunned, unsure of what to do. Nora was not a hugger, but tentatively at first I hugged back, and then I drew her into me.

  A moment later, the moment was gone, and Nora wanted to know what I had written about my mother. Nothing, I said. I had written about her several times over the years, and I had nothing new, nothing fresh to say. Nora was adamant. I must write something. I said my mother was special, buoyant, extremely competent, and could have—and here I am foreshadowing what I did write—been president of the United States had she been a man. “Write that,” Nora ordered. I did.

  Soon, Nora was moved from the leukemia floor, the seventh, to the fourteenth and the very room Mona had usually occupied. It was where Nora had visited her.

  Mona was only able to make a single visit. She sat where Nora once had and faced the bed that she had so recently occupied herself. She gave Nora a cashmere throw. They talked of this and that—neither this nor that being what was happening to them both. Mona was weak and could not stay long. I put her in a wheelchair and took her home.

  By then, the decision had been made to remain mum about Nora’s condition. We had all become accustomed to maintaining silence, to becoming suddenly hard of hearing when asked about Nora, to brushing aside the mild and always tentative query. Some people gleaned the approaching tragedy. They knew enough not to insist on knowing.

  A new, more powerful, chemo was tried. Nora had been reluctant to do that, having little faith that it would work. She went ahead anyway—as much, I think, to prove that she was right as to stave off death. She swiftly went bald, wore a Lana Turner–style turban, and seemed to get thinner. The numbers became important—the reds, the whites, the platelets. They were on the move.

  * * *

  Looking back now, her friends could see so many clues. Her appearance. Her unknowable schedule, her disappearances, and, of course, the rearview-mirror hints dropped in what she wrote. In her final book, a collection called I Remember Nothing, the last essay was titled “What I Will Miss.” It followed a chapter titled “What I Won’t Miss” and only makes sense, really, if you know it was written by someone who knew life was coming to an end. The book was published in 2010; in less than two years, Nora would be dead.

  Nora’s list is mostly about family—Nick and her adored boys—and family events like Christmas and Thanksgiving and the dogwood tree that she and Nick planted on the East Hampton property. She mentioned New York several times. She’d miss “a walk in the park” and “the park” and “Shakespeare in the Park” and “the view out the window,” which, in her New York apartment, was of that art deco wonder the Chrysler Building.

  She said she’d miss Paris and “next year in Istanbul,” where she had just been, and then New York again—“coming over the bridge to Manhattan.” She had driven over that bridge countless times returning from Long Island and had filmed it at least twice, but to see the brazen city pop out of the brittle darkness of a winter’s night was always to see it refreshed, as if scrubbed clean over the weekend.

 
As she grew older, Nora came to hate the geese that would fly low over East Hampton. She wrote about this. She wrote about how she’d take the kids out to Long Island when school got out and not return till after Labor Day. In July, the geese would show up, flocks of them whooshing overhead, honking incessantly. She wrote how the sight and sound used to thrill her—when she had endless summers to go.

  As she got older—she wrote this when she was sixty-nine—the geese became a clock ticking out her life. The geese came to mock us, Nora and I decided one day. They honked of summers past and of people gone, of the Hamptons before the traffic on Route 27 got intolerable and private jets screeched insolently overhead. The geese. The geese had the traffic beat.

  Late in Nora’s life, she and Nick avoided the Hamptons in August and repaired to Los Angeles. They had a house in Beverly Hills, not too far from where Nora had grown up. It, too, was home.

  In that same essay, she mentioned the beach parties and the Fourth of July fireworks. Nora and Nick always had houseguests, and so did the Spielbergs. On the weekend of the Fourth, everyone would congregate on the beach, build a fire, sing songs. The Spielbergs had a movie star or two as guests, occasionally Gwyneth Paltrow, and maybe Nora would have Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.