She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  The Navaskys came out, Alice and Michael Arlen, too—the screenwriter and former newspaper editor Kurt Luedtke, who back then was so addicted to cigarettes that he smoked in the swimming pool—in the shower, too, he confessed.

  When Nora wrote about these summers, they were long gone. Some of the people were dead—Alan Pakula and Sidney Lumet, the directors; Peter Stone, the screenwriter and playwright; Joe Fox, the book editor and her former boyfriend; Judy Corman, her close friend; Lee Bailey, the ultimate host; Warner LeRoy, the restaurateur. And some had just moved away: John Irving; Winston Groom; Willie Morris, who went back to Mississippi, where he was revered and where he died in 1999; and, of course, Carl Bernstein, who seemed to go away and then come back. He now has a place in the nearby village of North Haven.

  Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn still came up in August and would end the summer with a party for Ben’s birthday. One year, the TV producer Norman Lear bused in twenty or so violinists to play “Happy Birthday,” but they were upstaged by one of the guests, the concert violinist Isaac Stern, who had accompanied Barbara Walters. He exuberantly grabbed a fiddle and did a solo of “Happy Birthday.”

  Every year Betty Bacall did the same suggestive toast to Ben. Every year, I offered a toast myself. Every year, we would cross the street afterward to Nora and Nick’s for a postmortem, and every year the geese would mock our mortality. The summer was dying, and so were we all.

  Why Jon Hamm? Why Not Me?

  * * *

  When Lucky Guy opened on Broadway, April 1, 2013, Nora got a good review. The play did not. In commercial terms, it hardly mattered. With Tom Hanks as Mike McAlary, the play sold out for its entire run—it was even extended—but it is doubtful it will ever be seen again. It has its flaws, but as a memorial to Nora it brought down the house. As far as the opening night audience was concerned, Lucky Guy was not about Mike McAlary. It was really about Nora Ephron.

  But it was not about Nora Ephron the playwright. It was about Nora Ephron the beloved writer, wit, public personality, film director, and, in the mind-jumbling that movies inevitably do, the characters in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Both movies starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, and of course, Hanks played Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy. That came about not because Hanks liked the play, but because he loved Nora.

  * * *

  Hanks is one of the titanic figures in all Hollywood history—hugely popular, hugely successful, and somewhat mysterious as to why any of that is true. You can look at Clark Gable and understand why he was Clark Gable. The same is true for Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart or even James Stewart, to name an actor with an everyman affect similar to Hanks’s. But Hanks is remarkable only in his unremarkableness. Nora once said she turned around as Hanks and Nick were walking behind her on the street, talking, and noticed not just that no one had noticed them, but that neither in a way did she. She was struck by Hanks’s total lack of distinction. On the screen he was vivid. The camera, as they say, loved him, but the people passing on the street didn’t give him a second look.

  The camera sees the truth. The camera exposes Hanks for what he is—smart and decent. He has been a prudent custodian of his own career. He has made very few missteps. He is not only an actor, but he functions also as a producer, director, writer, and, if it can added to this list, reader. He consumes books, many of them about World War II, not just battlefield stuff such as what went into Saving Private Ryan or the television series Band of Brothers, but such esoteric stuff as Not I, the memoir of the German historian Joachim Fest.

  Nora, too, was a kleptomaniacal reader, taking everything from everywhere. She was on every publisher’s list of tastemakers whose word-of-mouth praise for a book could make it a best seller. She read everything in either its manuscript or bound galley form, but she also ferreted out the old, the obscure—classics from another age. She put Hanks onto The Aspirin Age, a compendium of quirky, sometimes important stories by various writers and public figures, edited by Isabel Leighton and published in 1949. (“The Mysterious Death of Starr Faithfull” is reason enough to read the volume.)

  Over the years, Nora and Tom maintained a steady correspondence, not only swapping books but scripts and ideas. She sent him David Maraniss’s They Marched into Sunlight—as stunning a book about war as has ever been written—which Hanks optioned three times; but as often happens, nothing happened.

  Hanks showed her an installment of his HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, to see if she wanted to direct it. She did not. She, in turn, showed him various projects she was working on. One of them was the perennial Higgins and Beech, which Hanks liked but, like everyone else who had read the script, could not see how it could be made. She also sent him the screenplay version of what was then called Stories About McAlary.

  This was a film that needed a star. It needed one who could bring in the crucial first weekend crowds. It needed a star who could attract other actors. It needed a star who could attract a director. The project was getting that distinct Hollywood smell of death. It had been around. Everyone had seen it. Everyone had passed. Mike McAlary. Who cared?

  Tom Hanks did. He didn’t care about McAlary, but he wanted Nora in his life. From his days on the set of Sleepless in Seattle, he had been dazzled by her.

  “The thing is I wanted to be a part of her life and I wanted it until Kingdom come.”

  * * *

  As it happened, Hanks was in London in the summer of 2011, promoting his movie Larry Crowne. Nora was there as well. They got together—dinner at the Wolseley. In the end, about eighteen people showed up. One of them was John Hamm, who had become a huge star in the television series Mad Men. Hanks asked Hamm what he was doing in town. He said he was doing a reading for Nora. A play.

  “Oh, really, what play?” Hanks asked. He turned to Nora. “Hey, Nora, what play is he reading that you are doing?”

  “She said, ‘Oh, I’m doing that thing that I sent you a long time ago about the tabloid reporter that you thought was a jerk, Mike McAlary.’

  “I said, ‘Oh, is it a play now?’

  “She said, ‘Well, yeah.’

  “I said, ‘Oh, okay. Can I read it?’ ”

  Nora sent Hanks the script, which was still substantially similar to the screenplay that he didn’t much like. Still, he was both intrigued and feeling competitive. He asked how Jon Hamm had done. Nora replied that the reading was “interesting.” She had learned a lot.

  Hanks asked, “Is it going to be done in London?” Possibly, Nora said, but probably not. In that case, Hanks said, why not let him do a reading? If Jon Hamm could do it, why couldn’t he? You could, Nora said. And soon he did.

  Hanks did not cry, as Hugh Jackman had, but his reading was equally moving. The mood in the room was celebratory and for Hanks, who had never done something like that before, exhilarating. He was, if only for that afternoon, in a nondescript rehearsal room in the New York theater. On the other side of the door was Broadway. For the boy from Concord, California, the son of a hospital worker and an itinerant cook, it remained a big step.

  Nora started clearing her desk for Lucky Guy. Her time was limited; so was her energy. She had completed the script of a project called Lost in Austen, an adaptation of a four-part British television series about a present-day Jane Austen fan who, by going through a certain door, enters the world of Jane Austen. Nora would also direct.

  Nora was a huge Jane Austen fan. She not only mentioned the books from time to time, but in her valedictory essay in the collection I Remember Nothing, she lists Pride and Prejudice among the things she will miss. She had urged me to read the book and could never comprehend why I did not—could not, actually. (I could never get past the first three or so pages.) Nevertheless, she sent me her script for Lost in Austen and asked me what I thought of it. I thought, in short, that it was swell.

  So did Bryan Lourd, her agent. He had been fighting to get the movie made. But suddenly, his screenwriter-cum-director backed out. The film was to be shot in England
, and Nora, sicker than almost anyone knew, had to change her plans. She did not want to be away from her medical team in New York. Not realizing that her disease, sort of on schedule, was worsening, I argued against her. England has doctors, I said. England has hospitals. No, no. She wasn’t going.

  Lourd was stunned. “All of a sudden, one day I got a call saying you’ve got to get me out of this movie. It was completely out of left field.” He was bewildered, and some days later he had a telephone conversation with Nora, repeatedly asking, “What am I missing?” Finally, she told him.

  “I have a little problem, and this is what it is. I am going to be fine, and you are never allowed to talk to me about this again. Don’t bring it up!”

  Nora told Lourd that she had only one project she cared about: Lucky Guy. Lourd was as perplexed as everyone else about why McAlary mattered so much to her, but he did as he was told. “The play became the focus. Everything shifted to that. It was, literally daily, the play, the play, the play.”

  By then, the play was no longer just about McAlary or journalism or the romance of the tabloids. In retrospect many people saw it as unavoidably about a journalist who was dying of cancer by a playwright who herself was dying of cancer. It had not been that at the start, because Nora had begun the project while she was still healthy, and really, it was not that way even at the end, because the play was always about something and someone else. Still, McAlary’s cancer and Nora’s cancer—two writers dying of the disease we all fear—overwhelmed everything else. The play got to be about their death when all the while it was also about their lives.

  * * *

  In the meantime, Lucky Guy was not yet a play—a finished play—and Hanks had not yet committed. He had expressed interest, he had done the reading, he had mulled it over—but he had not yet said yes. That was understandable. He was not a stage actor. He had not done a play since college, but he knew theater and he knew he was not in shape for a huge role. It took stamina. It entailed a huge feat of memorization and, for Hanks, the forsaking of other projects.

  Yet he was intrigued. “I thought about it, just how it was going to fit into my life,” he said. He was “petrified of doing any stage work,” and that fear was a good sign. A challenge awaited, an antidote to apathy and staleness. The contract was before him. Hanks was reaching for yes. He was a man who honored his fear. He paid it obeisance. It enticed him. The play was about journalism and New York and the world of New York tabloid journalism in the urban mosh pit of the 1980s. All that came together for him.

  “I realized that I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

  As Hanks knew at the time, and as was going to become more and more clear, the play was hardly a finished work. Right off the bat, it needed a director. George Wolfe was brought in. As is almost always the case, he knew people who knew people. He knew Colin Callender when Callender was at HBO, and he knew Bryan Lourd, and he had a connection of sorts with Mike Nichols since Nichols had directed Angels in America for HBO while Wolfe had done it on Broadway. Last, but hardly least, Wolfe has been the artistic director of New York’s prestigious Public Theater. He was considered a genius.

  He was also appropriately theatrical, given to moments of near hyperventilation but possessed, as all good directors are, of a kind of X-ray vision. He could see the interior of a play, the dialogue that was not there that explained the dialogue that was there. With Lucky Guy, he had one persistent question: “What is this play about?

  “Why are you writing this play? Why did you write this play?” Pointing at the script, he would ask, “Why is this here? Why are you doing this? Why is this there? Why, why, why, why, why?”

  Nora paid attention. She would take notes and, as fast as possible, make revisions—and then exhausted, get some sleep. (At one point, Wolfe threated to quit because Nora was pushing back too vigorously. A lunch patched things up.) She was working against both the clock and what she thought were her own limitations. Like any writer, she had to wonder about what worked and what did not, about the reach of her talent. It was that quality of McAlary—his ambition roaring past his talent—that had so attracted her to this project in the first place, she told Wolfe. She felt the same way, she said. Wolfe was stunned by that admission.

  “I thought it was a completely naked moment,” he said. “It felt very vulnerable when she said it, and I felt it was a brave thing for her to say.”

  It is possible, I think, to make too much of this admission. In Imaginary Friends Nora had indeed come up against the limits of her talent. The play was good, well worth an evening, and its themes were extraordinarily rich, not some boy-meets-girl confection. It was about important stuff—the blacklist, McCarthyism, political and personal loyalty, petty jealousy, two women and not a woman and a man. Nora had set a high bar for herself, a bar that maybe she thought either one of her protagonists—certainly Hellman—could have reached. She had come to the limit of her talent as a playwright, and that must have vexed her. She was a brilliant and effortless essayist and a charming public personality, a director and writer of clever and popular movies, but she read and thought on a deeper level and she wanted to write there as well. Lucky Guy was different. In some sense, it was almost autobiographical—the New York Post, tabloid New York, and the screech of brazen journalists. Nevertheless, people were raising the question she herself was always asking: What’s the point?

  The Point?

  * * *

  The answer to George Wolfe’s staccato question—“why, why, why?”—was once located on Mulberry Street in what was Manhattan’s Little Italy—a now-gone red-sauce Italian restaurant called Paolucci’s. The place was a two-minute walk from the old police headquarters at 240 Centre Street. Across from it was a humble tenement that had been cubicled for offices of the city’s many police reporters. This was known as the Police Shack and it was where many a great writer started and many of them ended. Covering cops was once an exalted calling.

  For Nick’s sixtieth birthday, two of New York’s most respected journalists, Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield, took over Paolucci’s and threw a party for him. A dinner like that for Nora would have included a bevy of Hollywood types, but this was one was pure Nick—cops (some robbers), Feds and prosecutors, reporters who could crack a safe with a phone call, a private investigator or two, lawyers of the criminal bar, magazine editors who eschewed readership surveys for their own gut, and the former mayor of the City of New York, John V. Lindsay. Paolucci’s had once been Nick’s place. On the menu was an item called Pork Chops Pileggi.

  It was a cold but bracing February night, and at the end of the evening Nora and Nick walked out onto Mulberry Street. Over their shoulder loomed the doomed World Trade Center. Before them was the nineteenth-century façades of Little Italy. I remember Nora’s face that night. Nick had been regaled for his abilities, his character, his inappropriate humility, and she was taking in Lower Manhattan at its cinematic best. She was visibly delighted.

  As far as I’m concerned, the party at Paolucci’s answered all of Wolfe’s demanding “why, why, whys.” It spoke to Nora’s romance about old-time newspaper journalism, harkening back to her days at the New York Post. It was what she meant when an exasperated Wolfe, a man of the stage and not the newsroom, asked her what in the world she found so compelling about journalism and she replied “I love it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love being in the bar with the guys.”

  McAlary’s tale was rich and its setting was rich and the characters were rich and the parallel cancers became an obvious and compelling deus ex machina—felt by the audience but absent from the play itself. But it was Nick, his world and his friends, Nick and the street reporters who were novelists or poets at heart, who not only was at the heart of the play, but made it possible.

  McAlary’s world for all its flamboyance, was a closed society. It was working-class, mostly Irish, almost entirely male, and, like the cops themselves, somewhat defensive. Nora was at a disadvantage here. She was fa
mous and charming, but she was hardly working class and she was definitely of the wrong tribe. She knew the people who owned the city. She did not know the ones who made it work. Nick did. He vouched for her. Her street cred came down to this: She was Nick’s wife.

  One by one, Nora had approached the people who knew McAlary best. She was, of course, well known to them all and the prospect of being portrayed in what was then a proposed movie is almost irresistible. Still, what paved the way for her—what gave her entry into the insular world that had been McAlary’s—was a very special credential.

  “You got to understand the awe that we all had for Nick,” said Eddie Hayes. “Everybody knew Nick. You’d meet him some place. . . . It was like, ‘Oh, Nick Pileggi, Nick Pileggi.’ He’d look sharp, and he carried himself good, and he was always polite and respectful. He dressed very, very nicely, classy. Anybody connected to him was like on the first team.”

  Jim Dwyer, another veteran of the New York tabs who wound up at the Times, had been at the hospital with McAlary the night he died. He, too, opened up to Nora out of respect and admiration for her work—and for her husband. “It’s funny, I don’t know Nick very well at all but everyone I’ve ever spoken to in my world, in the New York journalism world, they all think he’s the greatest guy who ever walked the earth.” With appropriate awe, Dwyer noted that even the legendary grouch Jimmy Breslin liked Nick.

  * * *

  Nora Ephron was a very smart, totally realistic, woman. Yet the New York she inhabited was partly a back lot in the Hollywood she had once left. She was utterly smitten with the city in all its cinematic aspects, its literary life, for sure, but also the parts that could not be seen—not the steam tunnels, subways, conduits, and such that course under the city but its film noir aspects that Nick understood and had mastered: the Mob and it characters. Say what you will about them—sociopaths or whatever—they are far more compelling than, say, the pallid types that play by the rules and commute down to Wall Street, crooks of a different kind, she might say. It was the shady types who called Nick, sometimes late at night, sometimes from the cushy gulag known as the witness protection program, that captivated her. Nick knew them. They knew Nick. Nora was a moll two or three time removed. It was close enough for her and just thrilling enough.