She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  That world and the reporters who knew it best, the guys at the bar and above all Nick, was the “why, why, why?” of Nora’s final work. Lucky Guy was for Nick.

  Nick was the luckiest guy of all.

  A Lunch Before Dying

  * * *

  As Nora died, she lunched. She lunched for business and just with friends. She lunched with people she had known a long time and she lunched with people she had just met. The closer she got to death the more she lived her life.

  Near the end, her friends started to sense that something was amiss. Sometimes she didn’t look quite right. To Gail Collins, Nora looked frail. Collins, a former New York Times editorial page editor turned columnist, had been interviewed by Nora because she had worked with McAlary at the New York Daily News. She had quickly been granted a membership in Nora’s ever-widening circle of women friends, including a book club that met occasionally to take up what I thought of as “Nora books”—writers such as Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Once Nora and Gail had discussed breast cancer and Nora had volunteered that she had had “some blood issues.” True to form, Nora made it appear as if these “issues,” while very scary, were over. She did not seem to be in any distress.

  Rita Wilson sensed something was wrong. She was appearing at Joe’s Pub, the café attached to the Public Theater, and on her last night there, Nora gave her a party at a nearby restaurant. It was May 9, 2012.

  “Her mood was subdued,” Rita recalled, but what remains italicized in her recollection is what she said following her curtain calls. She said she wanted to thank three people who were in the audience that night, one of whom was Nora. She said, “I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I feel this is the last time I may ever get the opportunity to do this.”

  It was.

  Looking back on it all now, some people recall things that Nora said that in retrospect are freighted with meaning.

  She had lunch with Sally Quinn. Their relationship had become episodic. Sally was in Washington much of the year, and when she did decamp for East Hampton, it was for August and Nora and Nick were gone. Nora was putting things back in place, doing some mending. She was in Washington for the Kennedy Center Honors. She asked Sally to lunch and they went to the Ritz-Carleton. Sally wrote about it afterward. The lunch was wistful, a word Sally used. There were long pauses. Something was not being said. When they left the restaurant, they hugged good-bye.

  “I wish we saw more of each other,” Sally said.

  “I know,” Nora said. “I feel like there’s a hole in my heart.”

  * * *

  Nora had lunch with Marie Brenner. Later, they walked a bit and stopped for pastries. Marie was surprised. Nora never had dessert. And then she asked for a ride to her house. Marie was puzzled. They were only three or four blocks from Nora’s East 79th Street apartment. They hailed a cab.

  * * *

  In December of 2011, Nora, Nick, and the boys went to Istanbul, found it not to their liking, and fled to Paris. There, Nora and Nick hooked up with the cookbook author and food show personality Ina Garten and her husband, the Yale economist Jeffrey Garten. The Gartens maintain an apartment in Paris, and Nick and Nora went there for a drink and then, along with Alex Witchel and Frank Rich, they headed to La Cigale Récamier, famous for its soufflés.

  Nora had known Frank Rich since the 1960s, even before he became the movie critic for the New York Post. (He later was the theater critic for the New York Times and, after that, a political columnist whom Nora greatly admired.) Witchel, his wife, was another writer, often on food. These were foodies par excellence in the seventh heaven of Paris on a rare cloudless day.

  “It was one of those magical lunches with the most wonderful people,” Ina Garten recalled. “It was a bright sunny day. And Nora raised her glass and said, ‘To better days.’

  “And we all laughed hysterically because, of course, there wasn’t a better day. This was the best day we could ever remember. And six months later we realized that she already had the dreadful news and there was nothing they could do. And I look back at that day and I think, she was the ultimate hostess.”

  Nora and Ina had met years before, at a birthday party for James Lapine, the stage director and writer, where they both discovered a mutual passion, not just food but a particular restaurant in Nice, famous for its truffle sandwiches. Nora had the recipe and later mailed it to Ina, who keeps it to this day.

  The two saw each other only occasionally after that, but Ina was present for one of Nora’s most notable meals. She served roast beef and Château d’Yquem, a celebrated sauterne with the retail value of a nice car. The pairing was eccentric, and the guests were even more puzzled when Nora started reading from the diary of Prince Felix Yusupov, the vastly rich Russian aristocrat, who had originated this meal. The wine was fabulously expensive, and the roast beef succulent and dripping with fat, and while it worked for the prince, it did not work for those of us whose Russian ancestry was not quite so exalted. (I hate sweet wine.)

  Over the years others have duplicated the prince’s princely meal, and they did so, probably, out of love of food or love of wine or merely to show off. But Nora did it out of love of guests, a quality Ina Garten, herself a self-taught cook, immediately sensed and appreciated. The food was not a meal, but an offering—a gift.

  Nora and Ina made one last plan for a meal. Nora would supply the wine; Ina would cook. On the designated day, Nora called to say she wasn’t feeling well. They never met again.

  * * *

  Laurence Mark, a producer, was set to go on with Lost in Austen when Nora told him she was dropping the project. Like Bryan Lourd, he was shocked, but Nora explained that she only wanted to concentrate on Lucky Guy, which was true but not the only reason. Still, Mark did not suspect anything was seriously wrong—not even as they were making Julie & Julia, and Nora took him aside. “We each found ourselves standing on some platform outside the set . . . and she just said out of the blue, ‘I just want you to know that I love that we’re getting to make this movie together. I love that you’re here and I love you.’ And a kiss on the cheek. And I was like, wow, I feel exactly the same way and that is incredibly sweet and thank you.

  “And then we just went on. She never wore her emotions on her sleeve. It was an odd moment and it somehow meant more to me in retrospect. I can’t help thinking she had this on her mind. . . . I just want you to know that. That’s all. And then we went on with the day.”

  Nora, of course, was saying good-bye.

  We’ll Always Have Paradoxes

  * * *

  Rita Wilson wrote an essay about Nora, It mentioned the Prince Yusupov meal and, also, Nora’s love of music, especially show tunes from Broadway’s golden age. What she didn’t mention was that these are paradoxes. Nora had no appreciation for wine, for fine wine that is. In restaurants, she asked for something cheap, invariably a red that was light on the palate, nothing too complex, and she asked for it with all the verve and authority of a connoisseur demanding a very specific vintage. Waiters occasionally didn’t get it and reacted as if their leg was being pulled, and Nora would persevere: The cheap stuff please. (In champagne, which she loved, she took it pink.)

  As for music, it’s true that she mentally archived the great Broadway songbook, but it is equally true that she almost never played the music—indeed, for a time, she had nothing to play music on. Hers was the only home I knew which had neither a phonograph nor a cassette deck nor a disc player—no music player of any kind. When she had asked me to help her choose the music for Sleepless in Seattle, and I roared over to her place in East Hampton with a dozen or so compact discs containing songs I thought she could use. A look of mystification came over her. She turned to Nick. Did they have a CD player?

  Nick ransacked the house. He looked in the dining room cabinets. No player. He looked in the living room ones. Still, no player. He looked everywhere he could think of. Nothing. No player. It turned out that the woman who was even then choosing the music fo
r her movie was living a life barren of music. Ultimately, Nick and Nora bought a boom box which must have cost considerably less than any one of their frying pans. It hardly mattered. It was almost never used.

  Nora was not indifferent to the role of music in her films. She spent a great deal of time considering what music to use and which version of a particular song was best. She listened carefully in the studio, playing some songs over and over. Yet in her daily life, music seemed to play no role whatsoever. I never knew what to make of this, since I write to music and have always had music players of some sort, in every office I’ve ever had. This was certainly not the case with Nora; she seemed to have no use for it. (Once, when Howard Stringer, a music aficionado, invited her to attend a prized performance of Luciano Pavarotti singing La Bohème, she replied, thanks, but she had once heard the opera.) To add to the paradox, however, I should mention that late in life Nora had an upright piano moved into her East Side apartment and a baby grand for the living room in Beverly Hills and resumed the piano lessons she had abandoned as a kid. She played in the afternoons. It calmed her.

  Another paradox: Nora was renowned for her sexual frankness, but her movies could have been shown in any church basement. In none of them did anyone take off their clothes. When it unavoidably came time for a couple to couple, she sternly directed the camera to mind its manners and look the other way. On Julie & Julia, when the Julie character and her husband made love, Nora filmed the scene delicately, insisting “I don’t want to see any skin.” Even then, most of what was filmed was cut.

  Similarly, in Lucky Numbers, Nora tried to avoid shooting a scene in a strip club. The script called for it, but Nora balked. The writer, Adam Resnick, had to talk her into doing it. Even so, there are no strippers in the club, an odd way to make money in an odd business. Nora insisted on no nudity, and when, in the same movie, John Travolta and Lisa Kudrow have their sexual moment, the scene opens after they have concluded and both characters are more or less clothed—he in a T-shirt, she in a nightgown and under the covers. This is a long way from X.

  And yet in Higgins and Beech, the script Nora cowrote with Alice Arlen, there’s a good deal of sex, much of it under covers, mind you, or—since it takes place in Korea during the war—tents of one sort or another. In one scene the script calls for the war correspondent Keyes Beech to put “his hands on her [Marguerite Higgins’s] breasts.” It’s tame compared to some films, but the script ripples with sexual tension relieved periodically by lovemaking and the sudden intrusion of war.

  Of all of Nora’s scripts, Higgins and Beech is the most erotic and also perhaps the most realistically romantic. Maybe because it is based on real characters, it eschewed a happy ending—merely a mutually agreed parting of the ways, his career and her career taking precedence over everlasting love.

  I have no idea how much of the script was Nora’s and how much was Alice’s. On the very day it occurred to me to ask Alice, she died. All I know is that Nora very much wanted to get this movie made and sent the script to anyone who had the remotest chance of making it, but she had no luck.

  Higgins and Beech was about newspapering, which she loved, combat correspondents, some of whom she had known in Israel, women out of their supposed place, love and sexual attraction and the rush of endorphins that comes when shells explode close, but not too close. Higgins and Beech were brave, maybe recklessly so, but their affair was as hopeless and as muddled as the Korean War itself. The war ended precisely where it started—and so did Higgins and Beech.

  * * *

  How to account for these paradoxes? The wine one is easy. Nora was the child of two alcoholics. She might have feared that she had inherited that awful proclivity, although I never heard her say so. Still, she had certainly witnessed the effect of too much drink, and it was not roisterous good fun, a quip followed by a hiccup—the fictional Nick and Nora of the Thin Man series—but a sloppy brawl. That the drunks were her parents must have been both painful and terrifying. For whatever reason, Nora was a moderate drinker, and while just about everything about food fascinated her, very little about wine did.

  Music was more of a mystery, but here again I would suggest something akin to taste. I cannot envision her at a concert, or, if I do, she is twitchy and impatient, wondering not just, as I sometimes do, why she cannot also read a book or open a newspaper, but what she is doing there in the first place.

  Her reserve as a director is harder to explain, unless the explanation is as simple as the number 1941. That was the year Nora was born, and it meant she was the child of an era—of several eras, actually. She came of age in the starchy and white 1950s, when married couples (in the movies anyway, which is how I know this stuff) slept in twin beds and men wore pajamas and kept a robe at the edge of the bed in the event they had to get up and walk a few paces to the bathroom. Women, of course, did the same. They in fact wore veritable ball gowns, billowy, lacy things suitable for presentation at court or, more routinely, a stroll to the bathroom.

  Then came the sixties and the rediscovery of sex. It had gone underground in the forties and fifties, like some stream that disappears and then bubbles to the surface, and anyone formed by those years might mouth the mantra that sex was an ordinary part of life, but we all deeply felt that it was not—that it was extraordinary.

  Nora, like me, was part of that generation, the generation that had no generation, the generation that had no name—pre–baby boomer or something like that—and the gift to our generation, aside from never taking air conditioning for granted, was appreciating the eroticism of restraint. What was not seen, what was not explicit, was more titillating than what was shown in dermatological detail. Nora was no prude—her essays show that she could write casually about casual sex—but she knew that patience is provocative and, to resort to a cliché, less is more. That was a lesson she took from the romantic comedies of the 1940s and 1950s, she once told Howard Stringer; and indeed one of her signature films, You’ve Got Mail, was explicitly based on the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner, which in turn had been based on a 1937 play. In all its versions—including the musical-comedy adaptation, She Loves Me—the eventual lovers are at first antagonists and don’t even kiss until the end of the movie. (On Broadway, that scene causes the audience to applaud—a palpable release of tension.)

  Sleepless in Seattle employs the same device. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks not only don’t meet until the end of the movie, they don’t even live in the same city—she in Baltimore and he in Seattle. And when they do meet, it’s at the top of the Empire State Building where, as it happens, Deborah Kerr was supposed to meet Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, a 1957 remake of the 1939 film Love Affair, where, once again, the lovers never get to make love.

  If Nora had a red line concerning sex, it had to do with women who had affairs with married men. She would sometimes name this or that celebrity who was unabashedly linked to some married man and roundly denounce her a tramp. The rest of the celebrity-soaked world might not agree—no opprobrium is applied to these matters anymore—but Nora had a refreshingly admirable grip on the bottom line: There are some things one does not do. This was both moral and emotional. More than once, it had been done to her.

  The 2009 movie Julie & Julia encapsulated Nora’s ethic. Julie & Julia is two parallel stories, one about how the blogger Julie Powell decided to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s classic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The other depicts how Julia Child herself learned to master French cuisine and, with Simone Beck, came to write her cookbook. Julie, a young, married woman, is played by Amy Adams. Julia, various ages in the movie but never really young, is played by Meryl Streep.

  Of the two relationships, Nora preferred Julia Child’s. She was a woman in a loving relationship with a supportive man. They were childless but clearly not sexless. They engaged in nooners, aka matinees. Paul Child hurried home from his job at the American Embassy in Paris, Julia Child from classes at Le Cordon Bleu. She needed, she once wrote, o
nly two rooms: the kitchen and the bedroom. “I would go to school in the morning, then for lunch time, I would go home and make love to my husband.”

  “You cannot have too much butter,” Julia would say—and so would Nora. Butter is the secret, essential ingredient in almost anything that tastes good. But it is rarely on the surface. Never even in the description. It is, in this way, like the sexual component of a romantic relationship—not blatant, not obvious, but essential, smooth and blended in.

  Julie Powell’s sex life, in contrast, was spelled out in even greater detail in her subsequent book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. At the time, the book worried Nora. In it, Julie reveals an extramarital affair. Her language is occasionally course, and Nora worried that the book would sully the image she had given a more wholesome Julie in the movie.

  Nora and Julie, and indeed Nora, Julia, and Julie, were peering suspiciously at one another across a considerable generational gap, possibly one that the audience shared. Julia Child, a star of what was once called educational television, was a generational figure herself. She had been born in 1912, and by her own admission—noted in the movie—she did not lose her virginity until she was in her thirties and had met Paul Child in China during the war. His next posting was Paris, where they cooked, ate, had lovely dinner parties, and made love often.