Wallflower at the Orgy Read online

  Praise for Nora Ephron

  “Her finely honed wit is as fresh as ever.”

  —People

  “Nora Ephron has become timeless.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A wickedly witty and astute writer.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Wry and amusing … Marvelous.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  ALSO BY NORA EPHRON

  FICTION

  Heartburn

  ESSAYS

  I Feel Bad About My Neck

  Scribble Scribble

  Crazy Salad

  DRAMA

  Imaginary Friends

  SCREENPLAYS

  Bewitched (with Delia Ephron)

  Hanging Up (with Delia Ephron)

  You’ve Got Mail (with Delia Ephron)

  Michael (with Jim Quinlan, Pete Dexter, and Delia Ephron)

  Mixed Nuts (with Delia Ephron)

  Sleepless in Seattle (with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch)

  This Is My Life (with Delia Ephron)

  My Blue Heaven

  When Harry Met Sally …

  Cookie (with Alice Arlen)

  Heartburn

  Silkwood (with Alice Arlen)

  WALLFLOWER AT THE ORGY

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Viking edition published October 1970

  Bantam edition / July 1980

  Bantam trade paperback reissue / July 2007

  These stories originally appeared in Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Eye, Holiday, New York, the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Times Magazine in slightly different form. “If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come With Me. I Was a Mouseburger And I Will Help You.” originally appeared in Esquire under the title “Helen Gurley Brown Only Wants to Help.”

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 by Nora Ephron

  Introduction © 1980 by Nora Ephron

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73125948

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79693-6

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  THIS BOOK IS FOR DAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  The Food Establishment: Life in the Land of the Rising Soufflé (Or Is It the Rising Meringue?)

  “If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come With Me. I Was a Mouseburger And I Will Help You.”

  The Fountainhead Revisited

  Makeover: The Short, Unglamorous Saga of a New, Glamorous Me

  Women’s Wear Daily Unclothed

  Mush

  The Man in the Bill Blass Suit

  A Rhinestone in a Trash Can and The Love Machine Phenomenon of J. Susann

  Eating and Sleeping With Arthur Frommer

  Publishing Prophets for Profit

  The Diary of a Beach Wife

  An Interview With Mike Nichols

  On Location With Catch-22

  About the Author

  Preface to the 1980 Edition

  WALLFLOWER AT THE ORGY, my first collection, was published in 1970. It contains the first group of articles I sold to magazines after I left the New York Post, where I was a reporter for five years. I don’t think anything could have better prepared me for magazine writing than those years at the Post—though not for the reasons you might suspect. The Post was a terrible newspaper in the era I worked there, and everyone knew it: as a result, those of us who worked for the Post were treated far more shabbily than reporters for other newspapers. It was often extremely difficult to get an interview with whomever you were writing about; and if you did get an interview, it often took place at the end of the day, after the subject was exhausted from hours of interviews with reporters from more important media outlets. I remember, in my years at the Post, reading the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times and wondering why the reporters for that section were able to spend entire days with subjects I could barely get in to see; it never crossed my mind that it might have more to do with the clout of the publication involved than with the charm of the reporter. But the point is this: I was better off with my forty-five minutes because I was forced to report around the subject. I learned to go through the clips, find the names of people from the subject’s past, hunt them up in old telephone books, track them down, and pull out anecdotes they knew. What I’m saying may seem obvious; but one of the things that stuns me is how seldom reporters do this: the standard magazine profile these days seems to be written after a reporter spends a lot of time with the person the profile’s about, and only with that person. I can’t imagine that. I can’t imagine even going to see the person the profile’s about until I’ve seen twenty or thirty people who knew him when.

  The other advantage to all those years in the newspaper business is that I learned to write short. Much too short probably, but as vices go, that’s far better than much too long. Nothing in the Post ran over fifteen hundred words: six hundred words was more like it. And the lack of space forced me to select, to throw out everything but the quote I liked best, the story that seemed most telling. Again, I don’t mean to sound obvious, but several years ago I spent a year as a magazine editor, and I realized how difficult selectivity is for reporters who are spoiled by large amounts of space. I also don’t mean to sound as if I learned all this on my own; I had good editors at the Post. I complained about them at the time, complained as they slashed out what I thought of as my gorgeous stylistic flourishes and what they thought of as wretched excesses largely inspired by worship of Tom Wolfe. But they were right. And as a result, my writing style—such as it is—is very spare. Which is lucky for me, because it turned out that there were very few editors in the magazine business as good as those I had at the Post.

  Because I began as a newspaper reporter, it took me a long time to become comfortable using the first-person singular pronoun in my work. In the articles in this book I used it gingerly, often after considerable prodding from my editors. I was uncomfortable with it. The work I have done subsequently is considerably more personal and considerably more full of the first-person singular pronoun, but I still believe that the best approach to its use ought to be discomfort. Do you really need it? Does it add something special to the piece? Is what you think interesting enough to make the reader care? Are you saying something that no one has said? Above all, do you understand that you are not as important as what you’re covering? We are now in an era when the I-lost-my-laundry-while-covering-Yalta school of reporting has become an epidemic; when serious books that involve reporting often tend to be suffused with the author’s admiration of his own investigative techniques; when the narcissism of the press almost outstrips the narcissism elsewhere in the country. The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party. I look back on the original introduction to this book with a nostalgia that borders on pain. “There are times when I am seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to blurt out, in the middle of interviews, ‘Me! Me! Me! Enough about you. What about me?’ ” I actually wrote that. I actually believed that. And now, here I am, after two subsequent books—and the book tours, the newspaper interviews, the television talk shows, after all the me-me-me. “It must be difficult being on the other side of the notebook,” the reporters who intervi
ew me say. No. Not particularly. It’s boring. And unbelievably repetitive. And terminally narcissistic. But not difficult.

  Rereading this collection produced other fits of nostalgia. I am no longer the young woman who wrote about being made over by Cosmopolitan magazine, and I am no longer interested enough in the culture of kitsch to defend Jacqueline Susann. But here are these remnants of my former self, old snakeskins, and it amuses me to read them and remember how dippy I used to be. There are also pieces here that I’m proud of. But there’s nothing here extraordinary or brilliant; I am a journeyman, and if these articles work, they work as examples of old-fashioned journalism. I am not a new journalist, whatever that is; I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms. Which is fine with me.

  Introduction

  Some years ago, the man I am married to told me he had always had a mad desire to go to an orgy. Why on earth, I asked. Why not, he said. Because, I replied, it would be just like the dances at the YMCA I went to in the seventh grade—only instead of people walking past me and rejecting me, they would be stepping over my naked body and rejecting me. The image made no impression at all on my husband. But it has stayed with me—albeit in another context. Because working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at the orgy. I always seem to find myself at a perfectly wonderful event where everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all.

  I am not, I must tell you, entirely happy with this role. There are times when I would much prefer to be the one having the fun; there are times when I am seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to blurt out, in the middle of interviews, “Me! Me! Me! Enough about you. What about me?” But then I remember that, like so many journalists, I am stuck on the sidelines not just because I happen to be making a living at the job but because of the kind of person I am and the reason I was drawn to this business.

  Everyone I know who writes has an explanation for it, and for years I went around collecting them, hoping that someone else’s reason would turn out to be mine. The first person who gave me what seemed like a good one was a colleague on the New York Post (where I worked for five years), who told me during my first week there that the reason she loved her work was that every day, on the way home from work, she could see people on the subway reading her articles. For four years I looked around the subway to find someone reading mine. No one ever was. And finally, one day, it happened: the man next to me opened to a story of mine, folded the paper carefully back to settle in for a long read, and began. It took him exactly twenty seconds to lose interest, carefully unfold the paper, and turn the page.

  Then I remember asking a man who had no real reason for working at a daily newspaper why he was there. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I can’t think of any place I would rather have been the day the President was killed than in a newspaper office.” And that seemed like a wonderful reason—and I thought of the day President Kennedy was shot and the perverse sense of pleasure I got from working under deadline that day, the gratitude for being able to write rather than think about what had happened, the odd illusion of somehow being on top of the situation.

  But in the end, the reason I write became quite obvious to me—and it turned out to have much more to do with temperament than motivation. People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate. What separates me from what I write about is, I suspect, a sense of the absurd that makes it difficult for me to take many things terribly seriously. I’m not talking about objectivity here (I don’t believe in it), nor am I saying that this separateness makes it impossible to write personal journalism. I always have an opinion about the orgy; I’m just not down on the floor with the rest of the bodies.

  I feel that I should tell you a little about myself before letting the book begin. I feel this largely because I have just read the introductions to nine other collections of magazine articles, and all of them are filled with juicy little morsels about the people who wrote them. I think, however, that there is quite enough of me in most of these articles for me to forgo telling you how I love eating McIntosh apples and Kraft caramels simultaneously. That kind of thing. I should say that almost everything in this book was written in 1968 and 1969, and almost everything in it is about what I like to think of as frivolous things. Fashion, trashy books, show business, food. I could call these subjects Popular Culture, but I like writing about them so much that I hate to think they have to be justified in this way—or at least I’m sorry if they do.

  One night not too long ago I was on a radio show talking about an article I had written for Esquire on Helen Gurley Brown and I was interrupted by another guest, a folk singer, who had just finished a twenty-five-minute lecture on the need for peace. “I can’t believe we’re talking about Helen Gurley Brown,” he said, “when there’s a war going on in Vietnam.” Well, I care that there’s a war in Indochina, and I demonstrate against it; and I care that there’s a women’s liberation movement, and I demonstrate for it. But I also go to the movies incessantly, and have my hair done once a week, and cook dinner every night, and spend hours in front of the mirror trying to make my eyes look symmetrical, and I care about those things, too. Much of my life goes irrelevantly on, in spite of larger events. I suppose that has something to do with my hopelessly midcult nature, and something to do with my Hollywood childhood. But all that, as the man said, is a story for another time.

  New York, May 1970

  The Food Establishment:

  Life in the Land of the Rising Soufflé (Or Is It the Rising Meringue?)

  One day, I awoke having had my first in a long series of food anxiety dreams (the way it goes is this: there are eight people coming to dinner in twenty minutes, and I am in an utter panic because I have forgotten to buy the food, plan the menu, set the table, clean the house, and the supermarket is closed). I knew that I had become a victim of the dreaded food obsession syndrome and would have to do something about it. This article is what I did.

  Incidentally, I anticipated that my interviews on this would be sublime gourmet experiences, with each of my subjects forcing little goodies down my throat. But no. All I got from over twenty interviews were two raw potatoes that were guaranteed by their owner (who kept them in a special burlap bag on her terrace) to be the only potatoes worth eating in all the world. Perhaps they were. I don’t know, though; they tasted exactly like the other potatoes I’ve had in my life.

  September 1968

  You might have thought they’d have been polite enough not to mention it at all. Or that they’d wait at least until they got through the reception line before starting to discuss it. Or that they’d hold off at least until after they had tasted the food—four tables of it, spread about the four corners of the Four Seasons—and gotten drinks in hand. But people in the Food Establishment are not noted for their manners or their patience, particularly when there is fresh gossip. And none of them had come to the party because of the food.

  They had come, most of them, because they were associated with the Time-Life Cookbooks, a massive, high-budget venture that has managed to involve nearly everyone who is anyone in the food world. Julia Child was a consultant on the first book. And James Beard had signed on to another. And Paula Peck, who bakes. And Nika Hazelton, who reviews cookbooks for the New York Times Book Review. And M. F. K. Fisher, usually of The New Yorker. And Waverley Root of Paris, France. And Pierre Franey, the former chef of Le Pavillon who is now head chef at Howard Johnson’s. And in charge of it all, Michael Field, the birdlike, bespectacled, frenzied gourmet cook and cookbook writer, who stood in the reception line where everyone was beginning to discuss it. Michael was a wreck. A wreck, a wreck, a wreck, as he himself might have put it. Just that morning, the very m
orning of the party, Craig Claiborne of the New York Times, who had told the Time-Life people he would not be a consultant for their cookbooks even if they paid him a hundred thousand dollars, had ripped the first Time-Life cookbook to shreds and tatters. Merde alors, as Craig himself might have put it, how that man did rip that book to shreds and tatters. He said that the recipes, which were supposed to represent the best of French provincial cooking, were not even provincial. He said that everyone connected with the venture ought to be ashamed of himself. He was rumored to be going about town telling everyone that the picture of the soufflé on the front of the cookbook was not even a soufflé—it was a meringue! Merde alors! He attacked Julia Child, the hitherto unknockable. He referred to Field, who runs a cooking school and is author of two cookbooks, merely as a “former piano player.” Not that Field wasn’t a former piano player. But actually identifying him as one—well! “As far as Craig and I are concerned,” Field was saying as the reception line went on, “the gauntlet is down.” And worst of all—or at least it seemed worst of all that day—Craig had chosen the day of the party for his review. Poor Michael. How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful! “Why did he have to do it today?” moaned Field to Claiborne’s close friend, chef Pierre Franey. “Why? Why? Why?”

  Why indeed?

  The theories ranged from Gothic to Byzantine. Those given to the historical perspective said that Craig had never had much respect for Michael, and they traced the beginnings of the rift back to 1965, when Claiborne had gone to a restaurant Field was running in East Hampton and given it one measly star. Perhaps, said some. But why include Julia in the blast? Craig had done that, came the reply, because he had never liked Michael and wanted to tell Julia to get out of Field’s den of thieves. Perhaps, said still others. But mightn’t he also have done it because his friend Franey had signed on as a consultant to the Time-Life Cookbook of Haute Cuisine just a few weeks before, and Craig wanted to tell him to get out of that den of thieves? Perhaps, said others. But it might be even more complicated. Perhaps Craig had done it because he was furious at Michael Field’s terrible review in the New York Review of Books of Gloria Bley Miller’s The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook, which Craig had praised in the Times.