Nora Ephron
By Jerry Tallmer
There’s nothing wrong with Nora Ephron’s neck.
“Oh yes there is,” says the Nora whose latest book, a collection of what in an earlier and better day the New Yorker magazine would have called Occasional Pieces, is I Feel Bad About My Neck. As we meet, she is very smartly dressed, with an orange silk scarf tossed loosely around her neck.
I’m looking at it, Nora, say I, and there is nothing wrong with your neck.
“Oh yes there is,” says the screenwriter, playwright, essayist, novelist, journalist whom I have known since she was a girl from California breaking in at Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post back in the early 1960s. Breaking in, that is, with super-sophisticated high-octane openers like “She is the world’s first fully liberated woman” when dragon-lady Mme Nu of South Vietnam hove into town. Ninety-five percent of the bite of a story is in your lead. I never forgot that one of Nora’s, as you see.
I Feel Bad About My Neck is subtitled and other thoughts on being a woman. It is a book about that and other things, and also about aging.
“Sometimes I go out to lunch with my girlfriends -- I got that far in the sentence” [comes an interruption in the second paragraph of the whole book] “and caught myself. I suppose I mean my women friends. We are no longer girls and have not been girls for forty years.”
The 15 chapters, or essays, in I Feel Bad About My Neck (Knopf, 2006) cover such concerns as “Serial Monogamy: A Memoir,” “On Maintenance” (i.e., cosmetics), “Blind as a Bat,” “Parenting in Three Stages,” “Where I Live,” and “What I Wish I’d Known.”
“Here’s the thing,” the Nora in that orange silk scarf says now. “Most of the book was published in magazines. But it became clear to me that there was a book in the whole matter of getting older. Right after touching 60” — she was born May 19, 1941, in New York City — “I sat down, free associated, and sort of wrote down a bunch of things like having to move out of our large apartment to a smaller apartment, and stuff about makeup, and a little bio of myself in terms of food, and then sold it [to Knopf]. Bob Gottlieb, who is my editor, and Bill Clinton’s editor, and Robert Caro’s editor, not in that order I’m sure, suggested other pieces. ‘You haven’t written anything about children,’ he said. So I did that.
“One of the pieces I thought was a poem, but since I know nothing about poetry, I had to take his word for it” [that it wasn’t]. “It didn’t rhyme, I’ll say that.”
From the chapter on Parenting, by the mother of Jacob Bernstein (now 28) and Max Bernstein (now 27):
You love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, your throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the salad fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework. Every so often, sentences you never expected to say (because your parents said them to you) fall from your lips, sentences like:
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THAT COST?
BECAUSE I SAY SO, THAT’S WHY.
I SAID NOW.
STOP THAT THIS MINUTE.
GO TO YOUR ROOM.
I DON’T CARE WHAT JESSICA’S MOTHER LETS HER DO.
A TIARA? YOU WANT A TIARA?
In Nora Ephron’s case, and that of her sisters Delia, Hallie, and Amy, the parents who said some or all or any of those things, back there in Beverly Hills, were Henry and Phoebe Ephron, the extraordinary co-writing couple whose 20 years of successful Hollywood screenplays (and a scattering of Broadway comedies) ran from “Three Is a Crowd” (1944), inspired by the arrival of baby Nora into the world, to “Take Her She’s Mine” (1961), inspired by 19-year-old Nora’s letters home as a freshman at Wellesley College.
Actually, as noted above, Nora was born in New York City. “I’m five years old,” begins an essay, “The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less,” toward the end of the book. “We’ve just moved from New York to Los Angeles, and I’m outside at a playground, at my new school at Dohenny Drive in Beverly Hills. The sunlight dapples though the trees, and happy laughing blond children surround me. All I can think is, What am I doing here?”
“Oh yes,” says the distinctly dark-haired woman in the orange silk scarf. “I got out at 18, went to college, got a job at Newsweek, and then when I went to interview Victor Navasky, who was putting out [the satirical magazine] Monocle, he said he had no job for me but he’d like to take me to dinner” – just a business dinner during which Navasky invited her to contribute to a parody tabloid he and others were working up to be called The New York Pest. She wrote for it, and so did a lot of other now well-known people, and Dorothy Schiff, instead of being furious, told her nervous editors to go out and hire that bright Ephron girl. Navasky has since put in many years as editor-in-chief of The Nation. “Victor has changed the life of every single person he ever came in contact with,” says Ms. Ephron.
Did you ever as a kid, Nora, think you’d end up making movies – writing and directing movies – yourself?
“No, that was the last thing I wanted. One of the reasons I left L.A. was because I hated L.A. and hated the movie business or anything to do with it. I wanted to be a, quote, real writer – a journalist – forever.
“I got into movies – through television – because everybody was doing it. Silkwood [Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, 1983] was about my seventh script. I got a lot of jobs writing scripts, but none were made, and finally one got made – that one – mostly because Meryl Streep was committed to it.”
Your parents wrote a play about you.
“Yes. Two.”
Did you resent it.?
“No. We grew up knowing it was open season. My sister Delia got her head stuck in the stairway banisters when she was around 5, the Beverly Hills Fire Department had to come to get her out – and within a year it was in a movie, The Jackpot, [1950] with Jimmy Stewart. We all understood that’s what happens if you live with writers. Your life will be up for grabs.”
Phoebe Ephron had two precepts she passed along to daughter Nora over the years: 1) “Never buy a red coat,” 2) “Everything is copy.”
“So when I was in college and my parents made Take Her, She’s Mine [again with James Stewart] out of my letters, I never even thought they’d stolen my life. It was more about them than me, and it wasn’t mean. It was just what it was.”
And it was just what it was, too – as Carl Bernstein, a writer himself, might or might not acknowledge – when, after his and Nora’s divorce, she wrote a roman à clef called Heartburn that then became a Nichols-directed, Ephron-scripted 1986 movie of the same title. From page 105 of I Feel Bad About My Neck:
Everything is copy. I’m seven months pregnant with my second child, and I’ve just discovered that my second husband is in love with someone else. She too is married. Her husband telephones me. He is the British ambassador to the United States … He proposes lunch. We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”
“It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”
I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.
Aging, which is what this present book of Nora’s is, for the most part, really all about, is not a funny story, except, of course, that Ms. Ephron, the screenwriter of grown-up romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, cannot keep the wry laughter out of it.
“It just seemed to me,” she says at this remove, “that nobody had been particularly truthful about getting older. The kind of stuff that landed in my house was totally Pollyanna. Like, now that you’re getting older, you’ll have more time to travel. What they leave out is you can’t walk long distances any more, and when I do, my hip starts hurting. Another thing: Now you’ll have time to read. But no one tells you how to find your eyeglasses, and it’s really frightening how quickly my glasses prescription changes. As a journalist, I lived in the telephone book, didn’t you? It’s now getting just too hard to read the telephone book, or to pore over it with a magnifying glass.
“I wrote this book on my computer, here in New York, in increasingly larger type. I’m now up to 16-point.”
Well, so am I, Nora.
“Trouble is, because of the larger type, it [the book] turned out to be shorter than I thought. So I asked: Couldn’t they print the book in larger type? And they said they already had. Then, in the middle of all this, my friend Judy Corman, head of publicity at Scholastic and one of the many wizards behind the Harry Potter phenomenon, died. And then Henry Grunwald, the editor of Time magazine, died.”
Nora, Nora, there are those of us who are in denial on everything about death.
“Well, me too,” she replied. “Of course I denied reaching 60 by giving a big party for myself and pushing it all aside. There’s a point in life when you can call yourself middle-aged or whatever you want, but who are you kidding?”
Her first husband was Dan Greenburg, a comedy writer who loved cats and seemed almost totally humorless in social situations out of his cocoon.
Has he still got cats, one wondered.
“You know, I don’t have an answer for that.”
Her second husband, he of the British ambassador’s wife, was the Bernstein half of Watergate’s Woodward & Bernstein. (Nora told a TV interviewer not long ago that she’d almost from the first figured out who Deep Throat really was.)
Her third and present husband is Goodfellas screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi. Their home is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, “but two years ago, to my shock, we actually bought a house in Los Angeles. From time to time we go visit our house. It’s usually very nice weather, not like New York, where” – in snow and freeze seasons – “you go out for two blocks, slip on the ice, and that’s the end of that. The very day we signed for the house, Dr. Atkins [the diet man] fell on the ice and died – and the mayor [Bloomberg] made fun of him.”
Speaking of liberated women, the girl who wrote that lead on Mm. Nu has come pretty far and fast since then.
What’s it like for a woman to be out there directing and writing (or co-writing, mostly with sister Delia) motion pictures? The sharks try to get you?
“You know,” Nora Ephron says, “there’s no question but that it’s very hard to be a woman director. But there’s also no question that it’s just hard to be a director, period. Very hard for everyone, especially as the market gets more and more skewed toward young males who want dumb action-and-violence movies.
“I’ve never been particularly interested in [long pause] complaining about it, if you see my point. There are many, many more women in power in the movies now than when I started – a quantum leap. So things get better as things get worse. Women have huge amounts of power, but things still get worse and worse. If more women want to make really stupid movies with a lot of violence and so forth, they’ll get those jobs.”
You’ve never made any.
“No, but there’s no question -- if I wanted to, I could have.”
Is it fair to say you played a considerable part in opening up this moviemaking career to women?
“No, no. I think it just happened.”
Would you go so far as to say that your background [Henry and Phoebe Ephron] played no part in your entrée to that career?
“No part -- not remotely. Their career had ended in the ’60s, and my first movie, Silkwood, didn’t come along until 1983.”
All right, let’s let the essayist of I Feel Bad About My Neck have the last word,
“The other day I bought a red coat, on sale. But I haven’t worn it yet.”
Wouldn’t go with orange, anyway.
