She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  “We had a happy marriage because we were together all the time,” Julia wrote. “We were friends as well as husband and wife. We just had a good time.”

  Julie & Julia, a sweet movie, neatly encapsulates Nora. It is about food. It is about love. It is about the passion of the supposedly passionless middle-aged man and woman, love arriving not late, but right on time. It is about Paris. It is about writing and it is, in all those themes, about the life Nora made for herself with Nick.

  Bon appétit!

  Room 242

  * * *

  Sometime around early 2012, Nora’s condition worsened. She was working on Lucky Guy and her energy was flagging. As always, we celebrated my birthday (February 6), but Mona was too weak for us to go out. In the past, we had gone to Peter Luger’s, the renowned steak joint hard by the Brooklyn waterfront, and sometimes we went to Trattoria Dell’Arte for its heroic veal parmigiana and once or twice to the Four Seasons for its anything. This time we stayed home, and I don’t remember what we ate, and I don’t remember either if we discussed how Mona was dying or if we discussed that Nora was dying, and I don’t know whether later that night the two of them emailed each other about how we had not discussed how they were both dying, and maybe we didn’t.

  Looking back over my calendar, I see a dinner here and there with Nick and Nora and a reading of her play and a couple of screenings with her name attached—maybe I was just going to meet her there. There were other dinners of mutual friends, and in February she went to see Mike Nichols’s revival of Death of a Salesman, and she remained swaddled in her heavy coat throughout the performance.

  Bit by bit, she disappeared from my calendar—no lunches, no dinners—although we talked on the phone, and there was, looking back on it, the occasional reference to her time being limited, but I never knew what to say in response, and so, as I was doing with Mona, I denied the undeniable. I knew she was dying, but we rarely talked about it, as if just acknowledging it could bring it on faster or make it happen at all. Familiarity with cancer breeds respect, even awe, but also a huge, furious hate. I had come to see the disease as not merely some cells running amok, but as evil. It hid in the body, lurking God knows where, ready to pounce after the clueless chemo passed it by. This is why people say they have to “fight” cancer, make war on it, all these martial words that only empower it. I wouldn’t grant it the power to kill. I snubbed Nora’s cancer. “Fuck the cancer,” I would say to Nora. “Fuck the cancer,” I would say to Mona.

  Nora and I did not frequently talk about how she was feeling. We did not talk about whether she was angry, as Mona was from time to time, feeling cheated, as Mona often did, repeating the mantra “It isn’t fair,” which it wasn’t (But what is? And so what?) We did not talk about fear or whether she had scoured the Internet seeking information about death: How does it happen?

  * * *

  At noon on April 20, three months or so before her death, Nora went down to the Great Hall at Cooper Union where, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln had delivered a famous pre-presidential speech. She was there for a memorial service for Christopher Hitchens. Hitch, as he was often called, was a celebrated, iconoclastic writer and public intellectual, and while I knew him, I was not aware that Nora did. (Although she knew everybody.) I arrived a bit late, and took a place toward the rear of the hall on the right. I glimpsed Nora on the other side of the auditorium, to the left and closer to the stage.

  Hitchens was a brave and brazenly talented writer, but his politics were occasionally bizarre and not always to Nora’s liking. He had exuberantly supported the war in Iraq and he was famously opposed to abortion, a lonely position for a writer who at one time was on the left. So it could not have been political affinity that drew Nora to Cooper Union that day, although it could well have been the power and the verve in which Hitchens powered his ideas. (He once talked me into writing a column in defense of David Irving, a Holocaust revisionist later revealed to be a crackpot Nazi apologist.) There was much to admire about Hitchens, but he was surely trailed by an asterisk or two.

  What strikes me now, what didn’t even occur to me then, was the real, the secret, the awful reason Nora must have so admired Hitchens—not just for how he lived but also for how he died. He went down keyboard blazing, a succession of essays in Vanity Fair about his cancer and his treatment. He was, as usual, courageously honest, even embracing the “war” metaphor that is so often applied and misapplied to cancer. He, too, made it into a fight, while all the while recognizing that the cancer itself was blithely unaware that it was in a battle. He was frank, too, about the hideous repercussions of chemotherapy—the loss of hair being just a clichéd example, the loss of sexual drive being a more doleful one.

  Nora must have read the essays in dread. It’s not possible that she did not read them. Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, was a friend and if not a regular at dinner than a frequent guest, both in Manhattan and on Long Island—but friendship aside, Hitchens was impossible not to read. Everyone did.

  Hitchens had gone where Nora was going. He was in fact just a bit more than sixty days ahead of her, but he had chosen a different path. He had chronicled his death, as he had to, because his condition was impossible to conceal. Nora, standing down the Hall from me, was even then concealing her condition. She was just a mere month from entering the hospital for the final time. Famous writers saluted Hitchens—Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard, Ian McEwan—a brace of Brits once again repossessing their language—and Nora must have wandered in her mind to her own planned memorial service, which she had outlined just two months before.

  In his final writings, Hitchens continued his lively remonstrations against religion and its fellow travelers. He would not, he insisted, abandon his religious devotion to atheism just because he was on his deathbed. Nora, I’m sure, felt the same.

  Now I peer down the Great Hall and I see Nora once again. I knew then that she was stricken, but it did not compute—she looked so unlike someone who was dying. Now I feel her loneliness, not because she was in any real sense alone, but because she was, like any dying person, very much alone. When I turned to go, Nora was gone. I looked for her but to no avail. Knowing Nora, she hopped the subway, and vanished.

  * * *

  Nora worked. She worked hard, as hard as she could. She wanted to get the play done, but why? Why, if you do not believe in God and an afterlife, do you work as if there is one? Who are you working for? The applause, the rave of the critics, the fun of the after party, the surge of the limos—all of that. What for? Why not just lie on some beach? Why not sit by the pool in East Hampton or Beverly Hills or shoot craps in Vegas? Why even care about how you are remembered if you and your memory are gone? I remember Shakespeare. He does not.

  I think Nora worked because she was a writer and writing is not just something one does, but something one is. She worked, because to stop would have been like a death that precedes death.

  Is that right, Nora? I think of her as I write, imagine her head nodding or her rolling her eyes at my pretensions. I am currently reading The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe’s book on how certain people, mostly writers, died. I picked it up because the last chapter is about James Salter, who died in 2015 at the age of ninety. He died as he wrote, without fuss, at the gym. I knew Salter, and the reason I knew Salter was Nora. She had introduced me to Joe Fox, and Fox had been Salter’s friend and editor, and so we all had some dinners and I played tennis with him, but we never talked about writing or being a fighter pilot in the Korean War or, for that matter, sex, which pervades his work, like the remarkable and graphic A Sport and a Pastime.

  I would have discussed this all with Nora—Salter, Roiphe, Susan Sontag, who is also in the book, and Sigmund Freud, who according to Roiphe refused morphine and instead took aspirin for his intense pain because he didn’t want to lose his mental acuity—if he was going to live, he would live. He died of mouth cancer, first, though, of soothing morphine injections.

  * * *

&nb
sp; Somehow, word began to leak. Her friends were connecting the dots. Nichols had gotten some calls, and so, suspecting something, he called Nora, poking around in a faux innocent way. Nora instantly confronted J.J.: Had he talked? He had not. Tom Brokaw called me. By then Nora was in the hospital. Something was wrong, he said. Nothing was wrong, I said. Brokaw and I were old pals, and I was lying to him. I was doing what Nora wanted, but I felt lousy about it, and later, when he found out the truth, he used his howitzer of a voice to berate me—and then, after his ire had been damped, to forgive me.

  Christopher Lospalutto was summoned to the hospital. This was his second trip, both times to blow out Nora’s hair. He was one of New York’s primo hairstylists, and he worked on many celebrities and women who thought they either were or ought to be celebrities, but even among the special, Nora was somehow special. She had this way, this approach, this coy way of making demands or asking a favor—and all you wanted to do was do it. The first time she had called Chris she described herself as “a hag”

  “ ‘Hey, Chris, it’s Nora. I’m feeling like a hag. I hear you’re the guy to make me feel young. Can you help me out?’ I sort of chuckled and I’m like, ‘Nora?’ Thinking in my head, ‘Oh, Nora Ephron.’ ”

  From there on, she was a regular. She would sit in the chair, reading scripts and sometimes the newspapers. Once when she asked Chris about a local political race, he confessed ignorance. There then followed a lecture. He lived in the city and was obligated to know something about its governance, its politics. He must start the day with a newspaper. It would be permissible just to skim it, but he had to know the basics.

  Chris became a newspaper reader.

  He challenged her once to play Words with Friends. She was sitting in the chair playing, and Chris said he wanted to play, too. She gave him her quizzical are-you-kidding-me? look and said, “I will destroy you. I’m not going to play you.”

  Chris broke up, laughing. “You know what. You’re right. You will totally annihilate me in this game.”

  Chris heard all about Nora’s concerns about aging, which she related in a lighthearted way. “ ‘Don’t make me look old, don’t make me look old,’ she would say. Not in a vain way. It was just she realized obviously she was getting older and things were changing, but she came to me because she’s like, ‘I know you’re the guy who’s going to make me look young.’ ”

  In the hospital, the challenge was no longer to stave off aging but to disguise the disease. She made it clear that Chris was not to tell anyone that she had been hospitalized. It was June 9, the day of the Belmont Stakes, which Nora and some others were going to watch on television. She wanted to look nice. He brushed her hair.

  The second visit was different. By then, she had been through chemo. Chris brushed carefully, softly, taking clumps of hair with each stroke. Nora looked away. Soon, she was wearing caps, a sort of turban. She looked cute.

  She lost her appetite, and then it came back and she craved scrambled eggs. The nurses had recommended a place, and so J.J. went there, insisting on lots of butter. The eggs were entombed in an appetite-repelling Styrofoam container, and J.J., fearing the worst, hurried to New York Hospital. Nora tasted, and put the eggs aside. Not enough butter. J.J., whom Nora cherished, felt he had failed her. It was such a small thing. It was, though, a final thing.

  * * *

  Shortly before Nora died, the columnist Liz Smith announced her friend’s passing. Liz quickly retracted her item, but it was amazing to me then and remains so now that news of Nora’s condition had not leaked. After all, by then numerous people knew—and some had known for quite some time. Besides Joyce Ashley, who saw Nora on occasion at Memorial Sloan Kettering, there was Margo Urban, the wife of the celebrated private investigator Bo Deitl. They had bumped into Nick at the hospital. Margo was suffering from lymphoma, and she shared a doctor, Stephen Nimer, with Nora. Nick asked them to keep the secret. For five years they did.

  In addition to Nora’s doctors and their staffs, a vast number of nurses and hospital administrators knew of Nora’s condition. In an era of rancid Internet gossip sites, I kept expecting news about Nora to become public. It never did, not because she was of no interest, but rather because she was so cherished.

  On the Oprah show back when she said how much she wanted to eat good bread and butter every day, she also said she would be miserable at dying. Oprah asked her if she had fears, and she said yeah. “I’m afraid of dying. That’s the reality. I don’t think I’m going to be very good at it. Really, I don’t. I mean, there are people who are really, you know, there are people who die magnificently. I am going to—it’s going to be horrible.”

  * * *

  Room 242 began to fill with people. The days spilled into one another. Nick, Delia, Max, Jacob, Amanda, and I trailed Nora from the seventh to the fourteenth floor. Jacob, peripatetic and twitchy as a ganglion, worked off his grief by phoning the hard news to those who had to know. Max, the tattoos on his arms that Nora hated concealed by his shirt, glumly waited. Hallie came from Massachusetts and Amy from California and, a bit later, her old friend Diane Sokolow joined the vigil. Ken Auletta rushed off to India on assignment for the New Yorker.

  Nora asked Nick to contact Louise Grunwald, her friend and the successor to Lee Bailey as her mentor as a hostess and, more pertinently, the widow of Henry Grunwald, the former editor in chief of Time Inc., later U.S. ambassador to Austria but also the son of a Viennese librettist. Henry Grunwald, who died in 2005, had prepared instructions for his memorial service, not only the speakers but the music to be played—a bit of Haydn’s Sun Quartets and a sprinkling of opera, La Bohème and The Marriage of Figaro, with a rousing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as the penultimate number. Nora had been appropriately impressed by the service. Grunwald’s instructions had been placed in a file labeled “Exit.”

  Nora had prepared a version of her own. It, too, was labeled “Exit.” It suggested the speakers she wanted at her memorial service, its length (forty-seven minutes), and suggested a venue, the auditorium of the Ethical Culture School on Central Park West. She did not want a languid memorial service with too many speakers making too many speeches mostly about themselves—Nora harshly reviewed memorial speakers who felt that the loss was mostly their own—and she asked that the event be held soon after her death, a prolonged waiting period being “creepy.”

  * * *

  Nora’s memorial service was held at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center. Nora was finally wrong. The Ethical Culture School was way too small. About eight hundred people came that day for a program that Nora had largely planned. (Her “Exit” instructions even told Nick where to get the sandwiches for the smaller reception he’d give the day following her death.)

  There were eleven speakers in all. Marty Short led off and then I followed and then, in probably not the right order, Delia, Max, Jacob, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Rosie O’Donnell, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, and J.J. Sacha. A large picture of Nora hung as a backdrop. She was dressed in her customary white blouse with a high collar. She smiled and I smiled, recalling her condemnation of anyone who ducked a funeral by saying that the deceased “would understand.”

  “Well, I would not understand,” Nora used to say. I saw her up there, taking names.

  Before the program began, we eulogists gathered in a room backstage. J.J. issued last-minute instructions of some sort—it is all a blur—and then had some moments of intense anxiety in which to steady ourselves. People greeted one another, but there was not a lot of talk. Many of the eulogists were seasoned performers, but still they maintained the silence of the terrified.

  It was an emotionally draining event. Most of the speakers were still coming to grips with the suddenness of Nora’s death, and they were, I think, also measuring themselves against her. She was a eulogist without parallel, and the only good reason I could think of for dying was to be sent off by Nora. Meryl Streep acknowledged what we all felt. “Normally what I would have done on a day like toda
y is call her up and get some jokes and some advice,” Streep said in her eulogy. “She’d ask me who was speaking and in what order, and I’d eventually make her write the speech for me.”

  We were all on our own.

  Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson did a skit imitating Nora and Nick, particularly Nick’s ability to solve almost any problem with a large tip. Rita, as Nora, started fine, but composure slowly slipped from her. She cried. She soldiered on, playing Nora to Tom’s Nick, but her grief overwhelmed her humor. She couldn’t hold back the tears.

  Hanks, clearly distraught, nevertheless stayed composed. When he and Rita had finished, when the program itself was completed, Hanks met with Colin Callender and George Wolfe. They told Hanks he had to do Lucky Guy for Nora.

  “Let’s do it,” Hanks said.

  In the lobby, mourners were being served pink champagne.

  * * *

  Nora used to scoff at people who spoke for the dead: This is what they would have wanted—something like that. And yet, Nora’s memorial service was exactly what she would have wanted, although she couldn’t have known it. But back in room 242, back where she was dying, the immensity of the mourning was not yet evident, not to her, not to us. Nora was our friend. She was the hostess, the game player, the organizer, the writer, the director—well-known, of course, but not famous. Not in that way. No. Of course not. Even she had it wrong. The Ethical Culture School. No. Not even close.

  The nurses, I think, sensed the truth. They walked in and out of the room, gravely professional in their demeanor, moving silently, as if on the sterile hospital air itself. They said nothing.