The Most of Nora Ephron Read online

  About the Book

  Nora Ephron’s brilliantly funny writing paved the way for female wits like Lena Dunham and Tina Fey. Here is a comprehensive anthology of Nora Ephron’s writings on journalism, feminism, and being a woman; on the importance of food (including of course her favourite recipes), and on the bittersweet reality of growing old. As well as many personal pieces from the writer who always sounded like your ideal BFF, this collection includes extracts from her bestselling novel Heartburn, written in the wake of her devastating divorce from Carl Bernstein, and from her hilarious screenplay for the movie When Harry Met Sally, as well as the complete text of her recent play Lucky Guy, published here for the first time.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Introduction to the British Edition by India Knight

  Introduction by Robert Gottlieb

  The Journalist

  Introduction to Wallflower at the Orgy

  Journalism: A Love Story

  How to Write a Newsmagazine Cover Story

  The Assassination Reporters

  The Palm Beach Social Pictorial

  The Boston Photographs

  Russell Baker

  The Detroit News

  The Ontario Bulletin

  Gentlemen’s Agreement

  I Just Want to Say: The World Is Not Flat

  The Making of Theodore H. White

  The Advocate

  Vaginal Politics

  Miami

  Reunion

  Commencement Address to Wellesley Class of 1996

  The Profiler: Some Women

  Helen Gurley Brown: “If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come with Me …”

  Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post

  Dorothy Parker

  Lillian Hellman: Pentimento

  Jan Morris: Conundrum

  Pat Loud: No, But I Read the Book

  Julie Nixon Eisenhower: The Littlest Nixon

  Lisbeth Salander: The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut

  The Novelist

  Heartburn

  The Playwright

  Lucky Guy

  The Screenwriter

  When Harry Met Sally …

  The Foodie

  Serial Monogamy: A Memoir

  Baking Off

  I Just Want to Say: The Egg-White Omelette

  Gourmet Magazine

  A Sandwich

  I Just Want to Say: Teflon

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

  About Having People to Dinner

  The Blogger

  The First Annual “Tell Us What You’re Cooking This Year for Thanksgiving Dinner That You Didn’t Cook Last Year”

  Hello. By the Way. Whatever.

  Deep Throat and Me: Now It Can Be Told, and Not for the First Time Either

  The Curious Incident of the Veep in the Summertime

  Hooked on Anonymity

  One Small Blog

  On Bill Clinton

  A Million Little Embellishments

  Scooter, Rosa Lopez, and the Grassy Knoll

  Reflections on Reading the Results of President Bush’s Annual Physical Examination

  My Weekend in Vegas

  O. J. Again

  Say It Ain’t So, Rupe

  Melancholy Babies

  Take My Secretary of State, Please

  On Being Named Person of the Year

  Condi’s Diary

  Some People

  What Did You Do in the War?

  How to Foil a Terrorist Plot in Seven Simple Steps

  My Top Ten New Year’s Resolutions

  Hooked on Hillary

  White Men

  It Ought to Be a Word

  Personal

  The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less

  The Legend

  Me and JFK: Now It Can Be Told

  A Few Words About Breasts

  The Mink Coat

  Parenting in Three Stages

  The D Word

  Fantasies

  On Maintenance

  The Six Stages of E-mail

  Considering the Alternative

  On Rapture

  Revision and Life: Take It from the Top—Again

  I Feel Bad About My Neck

  What I Wish I’d Known

  I Hate My Purse

  Christmas Dinner

  I Remember Nothing

  The O Word

  What I Won’t Miss

  What I Will Miss

  About the Author

  Also by Nora Ephron

  Copyright

  Introduction to the British Edition by India Knight

  Nora Ephron, who died in 2012, left a legacy stretching far beyond Hollywood: she taught us how to live our messy lives. I often think, when someone famous has died at a ripe old age, that some of the keening and rending of garments is overegged. It is as though we are surprised, scandalized, appalled by the fact that old people who have lived rich, splendid lives should die, so we respond as though they were not old people but children and bandy about words such as “tragic”. Except the deaths are not untimely at all: people get old, and old people eventually die, and it is sad, but there you are. Decent innings and all that—they’re not four years old. Nora Ephron, though: that is a whole other thing. Like anyone who has come across her or her work in its various incarnations, I really liked the idea of Ephron reporting back bittersweetly, cleverly, beadily, comfortingly on the indignities of female old age; I would love to have watched a film scripted by her on the subject—who on earth is there to script such a film now she is gone?

  She visited this territory in her last two books, I Feel Bad about My Neck and I Remember Nothing, but she was not quite old enough yet. You got the feeling that these were rich pickings and she had only just got going. She was 71 when she died in June 2012 of pneumonia; five years earlier she had been diagnosed with an acute form of leukaemia, although she had successfully kept that a secret from almost everyone. She did not look 71—“I look as young as a person can look, given how old I am”—but she wrote about ageing brilliantly: “You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck,” or: “Why do people write books that say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.”

  If that is too depressing, she also wrote, a year before she died, that she would never want to go back to her twenties or thirties but that she would leap at the chance to be magicked back to her forties, fifties and sixties, the best years. One of her pieces of advice to the young was: “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.” Also: “Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was 26. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re 34.”

  Ephron’s tone was knowing, funny and smart. In an essay entitled On Maintenance, she described the endless amount of effort it took her to look halfway presentable once old age took hold: “The amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair any more is the secret upside of death.” Towards the end of the essay, Ephron sees an unkempt, grey-haired homeless woman with a moustache, a monobrow and grubby nails. She concludes that she is “only about eight hours a week away from looking exactly like that woman on the street”.

  No matter how improbable the circumstance, there was always a strong domestic undercurrent in her writing. I love the generosity and empathy inherent in this, especially coming from someone of her
vintage, who could be forgiven for believing that a woman’s place was anywhere but the kitchen, even though this would bypass the simple fact that a) women tend to spend quite a lot of time in kitchens and it does not mean they are chattels, and b) food is nice. Ephron was too clever to ignore the crashingly obvious or to pretend, on the pretext of following orders, to believe in things that did not stand up; she would never have made a politician. She called herself a feminist, but she scarcely prattled the party line. Taking note of the incredible rivalries and animosities among feminists in the 1970s, Ephron wrote in her book Crazy Salad (1975): “The women’s liberation movement at this point in history makes the American Communist party of the 1930s look like a monolith.” Jonathan Yardley, revisiting the book in 2004 in the Washington Post, notes Ephron’s reluctance to march with the feminist orthodoxy. “Perhaps,” he writes, “after surpassingly turgid feminist tomes such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, readers were ready for a fresh, undogmatic, cheeky view of a subject about which too many people clearly had gotten entirely too solemn.”

  Crazy Salad, a sort of early version of Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to Be a Woman, sold by the truckload for the same reasons: fewer immutable diktats, less angry theory, more real life written by someone recognizably sane, funny and clever. Its tone enabled Ephron to say, later in life, that feminism was all very well, but “there’s a reason why 40, 50 and 60 don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye.”

  She was bang-on where it mattered, though: giving the 1996 commencement address to the graduating students of her all-women alma mater, Wellesley College (Ephron studied political science), she said: “In my business, the movie business, there are many more women directors, but it’s just as hard to make a movie about women as it ever was, and look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker and nun. It’s 1996, and you are graduating from Wellesley in the year of the Wonderbra. The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.”

  Ephron’s unapologetic domestic streak manifested itself most obviously with the recipes and foodie anecdotes with which she studded her books; she was wonderfully, headily greedy, particularly for one so Manhattanishly whip-thin (low-carbing, according to an essay in I Remember Nothing). Her heavily autobiographical only novel, Heartburn, charts the breakdown of a marriage, with recipes; not only that, but the recipes work brilliantly. Ephron, “Rachel” in the book, was in real life married to Carl Bernstein (“Mark”), who, with Bob Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal; they were a Washington power couple, upper middle class, intellectual, glitzy, neurotic in the American manner. While Ephron was pregnant with their second child, Bernstein started an affair with Margaret (now Baroness) Jay, for reasons that Ephron/Rachel found puzzling: Jay’s fictionalized doppelganger, Thelma Rice, has “a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb” and, as I recall, enormous feet. In life as in Heartburn, Bernstein left Ephron when she was heavily pregnant. In the book, the narrator avenges herself by telling le tout DC that Thelma Rice has VD.

  In real life, of course, she avenged herself by writing it all down; the book was a bestseller and was later turned into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Except it was not really vengeance: the defining theme of Ephron’s writing, whether it is film, novel or memoir, is that when bad things happen, you address them directly, cobble together a solution as best you can and move on, never looking back; if you can at some point laugh at your misfortune, all the better. She was whatever the opposite of self-pitying is, and you get the sense that, at some level, she thought of herself as the willing victim of a huge cosmic joke. Heartburn is as hilarious as it is heart-breaking and as brittle (very) as it is steely (even more). I discussed it a couple of years ago on a book programme on Radio 4. The other guest was the singer Richard Hawley; we had both been asked to pick a favourite novel. He chose Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck. I picked Heartburn. We had to read each other’s books in order to have a discussion; he might as well have chosen The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to my Brideshead Revisited. Hawley was less than enchanted by my choice—although he admitted the book had made him laugh—and said something like (I cannot find the recording, so I paraphrase): “These awful rich, spoilt people and their rich, spoilt, messy lives—what’s the matter with them?”

  That criticism is precisely one of the things I love about Heartburn and about Ephron’s work generally (it has been observed, rightly, that the films she scripted feature super-articulate, affluent people in super-lovely, affluent interiors; part of her skill is that the viewer seldom resents this). She wrote brilliantly and without embarrassment about the world she not only inhabited but embodied. Why pretend? She was the kind of woman who liked good clothes (“Don’t buy anything 100% wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store”) and manicures (“Sometimes it seemed there were more nail places in Manhattan than there were nails”) and saw no reason that this should be indicative of some sort of fatal frothiness. Some female writers in the public eye pretend they do not have a cleaner and make their bit of postcode sound edgier than it is, so you can feel they are more like you. She was their opposite. It helped, of course, that she had a mind like a steel trap and that she was so good at her job that, whatever your circumstances, when you were reading her you felt she was more like you than anyone else alive.

  The steel-trap mind was born in Manhattan and, from the age of four, bred and honed in Beverly Hills, though she legged it to New York, with which she had a passionate, lifelong love affair, as a young woman. She was the eldest of four sisters, all of whom became writers. Her parents were successful Hollywood screenwriters; one of Ephron’s early memories was of her mother sitting at the dinner table and saying: “Everything is copy.” And so it was, too, for Nora, who made her name as a journalist with pieces about the appalling smallness of her breasts; the ghastly blandness of egg-white omelettes; therapy; the difficulties surrounding inheritance; feminism; her parents’ alcoholism; the unbelievable deliciousness of butter—she was Jewish but, asked if she practised a religion, said: “You can never have too much butter—that is my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it”—the pain of being left; the horror of wrinkles; the bliss of reading—“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learnt something, become a better person”.

  In I Remember Nothing, she wrote a list of the things she would miss when she died. These included her kids, Nick Pileggi (her third husband, to whom she was married for 20 years; when asked to contribute to a book of six-word memoirs, she wrote: “Secret to life, marry an Italian”), waffles, the concept of waffles, bacon, the park, bed, Paris, taking a bath, and pie. The things she wouldn’t miss included “panels on Women in Film”, mammograms, bad dinners and bras.

  Nora Ephron will probably be best remembered for her talents as a scriptwriter: her cinema work—she directed and produced as well as wrote—was outstanding; you would want to garland her even if she had never done anything else. But they were the tip of a gigantic talent iceberg: she was a journalist, an essayist, a novelist, a wife, a mother. She wrote plays as well as books and wrote incredibly well about food, which may seem an odd thing to single out but is extremely difficult. She was, in her youth, an intern for John F. Kennedy, and remarked in 2003 that she was probably the only one he never hit on. She was nominated for dozens of august awards, including three Oscars, and won some. In what we must, I suppose, call her old age, she became a blogger for the Huffington Post, notably writing about Ryan O’Neal failing to recognize his own daughter and making a pass at her at his ex-wife’s funeral.

  At the Wellesley address in 1996, she told the graduates: “What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complicati
ons. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands … I hope that you choose not to be a lady.” Nora Ephron was a lady, though she may not have thought of herself as one, and she was also a total dame, the person you wanted to grow up and turn into—as well as, it goes without saying, being the imaginary fairy godmother of all women who choose to make a living by the pen and their wits. “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim,” she told the class of ’96. People give platitudinous advice all the time in these sorts of circumstances, but Ephron’s line about refusing to be the victim was the line she willed herself to live by until it became true. She was a heroine, pure and simple.

  —India Knight

  Introduction

  A couple of years before Nora’s death in 2012, she and I sat down to begin putting together the table of contents for this book. Then other things got in the way—her play, Lucky Guy; a movie script she was working on—and it was set aside. Perhaps, too, knowing how ill she was, she began to see the book as a memorial and that made her uncomfortable—she never said. But although I was aware of her dire medical situation, the original impulse behind the book was not to memorialize but to celebrate the richness of her work, the amazing arc of her career, and the place she had come to hold in the hearts of so many readers.

  The reaction to her death was an outpouring of disbelief and grief. Before the publication of her two final collections—I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing—she was, of course, admired and enjoyed for both her writing and her movies, but the readership of these last books seemed to me to be on another level. It was personal. Her readers not only felt that they knew her but that she knew them. Obviously, not all the people—more than a million of them!—who bought Neck were women who identified with her or sensed her identification with them, but certainly many of them were. She had become a model, an ideal, or at the very least, an example—she was telling them things about herself that were also about them, and giving them permission to think these things and feel these things. And she was also telling them what to look out for, what lay ahead. Her honesty and directness, and her unerring prescience, had made her a figure— someone whose influence and authority transcended her individual achievements, extraordinary as they were.