by Nora Ephron
The last time I saw her, she mentioned that she had heard the things I said about her on the radio. “Nora,” she said to me, “you know perfectly well you learned a great deal at the Post.” But of course I did. I even loved working there. But that’s not the point. The point is the product.
Nora Ephron’s Beef Borscht
Put 3 pounds of beef chuck cut for stew and a couple of soupbones into a large pot. Add 2 onions, quartered, and 6 cups beef broth and bring to a boil, simmering 15 minutes and skimming off the scum. Add 2 cups tomato juice, the juice from a 1-pound can of julienne beets, salt, pepper, the juice of 1 lemon, 1 tablespoon cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, and bring to a boil. Then simmer slowly for 2½ hours until the beef is tender. Add the beets left over from the beet juice, and another can of beets and juice. Serve with huge amounts of sour cream, chopped dill, boiled potatoes, and pumpernickel bread. Serves six.
—April 1975
Dorothy Parker
ELEVEN YEARS AGO, shortly after I came to New York, I met a young man named Victor Navasky. Victor was trying relentlessly at that point to start a small humor magazine called Monocle, and there were a lot of meetings. Some of them were business meetings, I suppose; I don’t remember them. The ones I do remember were pure social occasions, and most of them took place at the Algonquin Hotel. Every Tuesday at 6 p.m., we would meet for drinks there and sit around pretending to be the Algonquin Round Table. I had it all worked out: Victor got to be Harold Ross, Bud Trillin and C.D.B. Bryan alternated as Benchley, whoever was fattest and grumpiest got to be Alexander Woollcott. I, of course, got to be Dorothy Parker. It was all very heady, and very silly, and very self-conscious. It was also very boring, which disturbed me. Then Dorothy Parker, who was living in Los Angeles, gave a seventieth-birthday interview to the Associated Press, an interview I have always thought of as the beginning of the Revisionist School of Thinking on the Algonquin Round Table, and she said that it, too, had been boring. Which made me feel a whole lot better.
I had never really known Dorothy Parker at all. My parents, who were screenwriters, knew her when I was a child in Hollywood, and they tell me I met her at several parties where I was trotted out in pajamas to meet the guests. I don’t remember that, and neither, I suspect, did Dorothy Parker. I met her again briefly when I was twenty. She was paying a call on Oscar Levant, whose daughter I grew up with. She was frail and tiny and twinkly, and she shook my hand and told me that when I was a child I had had masses of curly black hair. As it happens, it was my sister Hallie who had had masses of curly black hair. So there you are.
None of which is really the point. The point is the legend. I grew up on it and coveted it desperately. All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit. Who wrote for The New Yorker. Who always got off the perfect line at the perfect moment, who never went home and lay awake wondering what she ought to have said because she had said exactly what she ought to have. I was raised on Dorothy Parker lines. Some were unbearably mean, and some were sad, but I managed to fuzz those over and remember the ones I loved. My mother had a first-rate Parker story I carried around for years. One night, it seems, Dorothy Parker was playing anagrams at our home with a writer named Sam Lauren. Lauren had just made the word “currie,” and Dorothy Parker insisted there was no such spelling. A great deal of scrapping ensued. Finally, my mother said she had some curry in the kitchen and went to get it. She returned with a jar of Crosse & Blackwell currie and showed it to Dorothy Parker. “What do they know?” said Parker. “Look at the way they spell Crosse.”
I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies—which I once thought of as totally unique—turn out to be clichés, so it was not a surprise to me to find that there were other young women writers who came to New York with as bad a Dorothy Parker problem as I had. I wonder, though, whether any of that still goes on. Whatever illusions I managed to maintain about the Parker myth were given a good sharp smack several years ago, when John Keats published a biography of her called You Might As Well Live. By that time, I had come to grips with the fact that I was not, nor would I ever be, Dorothy Parker; but I had managed to keep myself from what anyone who has read a line about or by her should have known, which was simply that Dorothy Parker had not been terribly good at being Dorothy Parker either. In Keats’s book, even the wonderful lines, the salty remarks, the softly murmured throwaways seem like dreadful little episodes in Leonard Lyons’s column. There were the stories of the suicide attempts, squalid hotel rooms, long incoherent drunks, unhappy love affairs, marriage to a homosexual. All the early, sharp self-awareness turned to chilling self-hate. “Boy, did I think I was smart,” she said once. “I was just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”
A year or so after the Keats book, I read Lillian Hellman’s marvelous memoir, An Unfinished Woman. In it is a far more affectionate and moving portrait of Parker, one that manages to convey how special it was to be with her when she was at her best. “The wit,” writes Hellman, “was never as attractive as the comment, often startling, always sudden, as if a curtain had opened and you had a brief and brilliant glance into what you would never have found for yourself.” Still, the Hellman portrait is of a sad lady who misspent her life and her talent.
In one of several unbelievably stupid remarks that do so much to make the Keats biography as unsatisfying as it is, he calls Parker a “tiny, big-eyed feminine woman with the mind of a man.” There are only a few things that remain clear to me about Dorothy Parker, and one of them is that the last thing she had was the mind of a man. The Portable Dorothy Parker contains most of her writing; there are first-rate stories in it—“Big Blonde,” of course—and first-rate light verse. But the worst work in it is characterized by an almost unbearably girlish sensibility. The masochist. The victim. The sentimental woman whose moods are totally ruled by the whims of men. This last verse, for example, from “To a Much Too Unfortunate Lady”:
He will leave you white with woe
If you go the way you go.
If your dreams were thread to weave,
He will pluck them from his sleeve.
If your heart had come to rest,
He will flick it from his breast.
Tender though the love he bore,
You had loved a little more….
Lady, go and curse your star,
Thus Love is, and thus you are.
What seems all wrong about these lines now is not their emotion—the emotion, sad to say, is dead on—but that they seem so embarrassing. Many of the women poets writing today about love and men write with as much wit as Parker, but with a great deal of healthy anger besides. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, which Parker was often accused of imitating, Dorothy Parker’s poetry seems dated not so much because it is or isn’t but because politics have made the sentiments so unfashionable in literature. The last thing I mean to write here is one of those articles about the woman artist as some sort of victim of a sexist society; it is, however, in Parker’s case an easy argument to make.
And so there is the legend, and there is not much of it left. One no longer wants to be the only woman at the table. One does not want to spend nights with a group of people who believe that the smartly chosen rejoinder is what anything is about. One does not even want to be published in The New Yorker. But before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth, and I have trouble giving it up. Most of all, I’m sorry it wasn’t true. As Dorothy Parker once said, in a line she suggested for her gravestone: “If you can read this, you’ve come too close.”
—October 1973
Lillian Hellman: Pentimento
I MET LILLIAN Hellman just before her memoir Pentimento was published in 1973. I was working as an editor at Esquire and we were publishing two sections from the book, one of them called “Turtle.” It was about Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. I’d never seen any of Lillian Hellm
an’s plays, and I’d struggled with Hammett’s mysteries, but I read “Turtle” in galleys before we printed it, and I thought it was the most romantic thing ever written. It’s a story about a vicious snapping turtle that Hellman and Hammett kill. They slice its head off and leave it in the kitchen to be made into soup. It somehow resurrects itself, crawls out the door, and dies in the woods, prompting a long, elliptical, cutthroat debate between Hammett and Hellman about whether the turtle is some sort of amphibious reincarnation of Jesus.
I have no excuse for my infatuation with this story. I was not stupid, and I was not particularly young, both of which might be exculpatory. Like many people who read Pentimento, it never crossed my mind that the stories in it were fiction, and the dialogue an inadvertent parody of Hammett’s tough-guy style. I thought it was divine. I immediately called the New York Times Book Review and asked if I could interview Hellman on the occasion of Pentimento’s publication. They said yes.
Hellman was already on her way to her remarkable third act. She’d published An Unfinished Woman, a memoir, which had been a best seller and National Book Award winner, and now with Pentimento she was on the verge of an even bigger best seller. She turned up on talk shows and charmed the hosts as she puffed on her cigarettes and blew smoke. With her two successful books, she’d eradicated the memory of her last few plays, which had been failures. Eventually the most famous story from Pentimento, “Julia,” was made into a movie, with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as Hammett, and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, the brave anti-Nazi spy whom Hellman claimed she’d smuggled $50,000 to in Germany in 1939, in a fur hat. The end of Hellman’s life was a train wreck, but that came later. I wrote a play about it, but that came even later.
Lillian was sixty-eight when I met her, and by any standard, even of the times, she looked at least ten years older. She had never been a beauty, but once she’d been young; now she was wrinkled and close to blind. She had a whiskey voice. She used a cigarette holder and one of those ashtrays that look like beanbags, with a little metal contraption in the middle for snuffing out the ash. Because she could barely see, the question of whether the perilously ever-lengthening ash would ever make it to the ashtray without landing in her lap and setting her on fire provided added suspense to every minute spent with her.
But in some strange way that you will have to take my word for, she was enormously attractive—vibrant, flirtatious, and intimate.
I went to see her at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which sat on a rocky beach near Chilmark. The interview is an embarrassment. I did not ask a tough question, and, by the way, I didn’t have one. I was besotted. She was the woman who had said to the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s patterns.” She had loved the toughest guy there was, and although he had been drunk for almost their entire time together, he loved her back. Now it turned out she had practically stopped Hitler.
In the afternoon after our first interview, I went for a walk down to Lillian’s beach. I’d been there no more than a few minutes when a man turned up. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was older, gray-haired, fleshy. He asked if I was staying with Lillian. I immediately became nervous. I stood up and made some sort of excuse and walked as quickly as I could over the rocks and back to the house. Lillian was sitting out on the patio in a muumuu.
“How was the beach?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Was anyone else there?”
“A man,” I said.
“Older?” she said. “Fat?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That does it,” she said.
She stood up and took off toward the beach.
A few minutes later she came back. The intruder had vanished. She was in a rage. She was apparently in an ongoing war with the man. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stay off her beach. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stop trying to have conversations with her friends. She would tell him again, if he ever dared to come around and she caught him lurking there. She was furious that he’d disappeared before she’d had the chance to order him away. I couldn’t believe it. She was dying for a fight. She loved confrontation. She was a dramatist and she needed drama. I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.
After my very bad interview with her appeared in the Times, Lillian and I became friends. “Friends” is probably not the right word—I became one of the young people in her life. She wrote me letters all the time, funny letters, mostly typed, and signed Miss Hellman. She sent me recipes. She came to my apartment and I went to hers. It was hard to imagine Lillian had ever been a Communist, I have to say that. I’d grown up knowing a lot of left-wing people in Hollywood who lived well, but there was no trace of the Old Left in Lillian’s apartment at 630 Park Avenue—no Mexican art, for instance, or Ben Shahns; it was furnished in a style that fell somewhere between old WASP and German Jewish—brocade sofas, small tables made of dark wood, oil paintings of the sea, Persian rugs.
She held small dinners for six or eight, and she always had rollicking stories to tell that I now realize were exaggerated, but which at the time were hilarious. She’d had a run-in with a saleswoman one Sunday in the fur department of Bergdorf Goodman. Jason Epstein had set her kitchen on fire making Chinese food. Lillian was fun. She was so much fun. She had a great deep laugh, and she always had a subject for general conversation. “My great-uncle has died,” she said one night at her table, “and the lawyer called to say, ‘He has left you a pleasant sum of money.’ How much money do you think is a pleasant sum of money?” What a game! What a wonderful game! We eventually agreed, after much debate, that $675,000 was our idea of a pleasant sum of money. She said we had guessed it on the nose. Was it true? Was any of it true? Who knows? I listened, enthralled, as she told me how Hammett had once run off with S. J. Perelman’s wife, how Peter Feibleman (to whom she eventually left her home on the Vineyard) had hurt her feelings by trying to make a date with one of her good friends, how she’d once seen a young woman she thought might be Julia’s daughter. This last episode took place on a cliff, as I recall. Lillian and Dashiell Hammett had been standing on a cliff when a young woman came up to her, touched her arm, and ran away. “I’ve always wondered,” she said. “Because she looked so much like Julia.”
Here is a letter she wrote me about delicatessens, my father, Henry Ephron, and me:
I am sitting in P. J. Bernstein’s Delicatessen, a place I visit about once a month. I have long been sentimental about middle-aged ladies who have to use their legs and several of the waitresses, being Jewish, have pounced on this unspoken sympathy. One of them knows that I do something, but she does not know exactly what I do; that doesn’t stop her from kissing me as I order my knockwurst.
A few days ago, when she finished with the kissing, she said, “You know Henry Aarons?” “No,” I said, “I don’t.” She pushed me with that Jewish shoulder-breaking shove. “Sure you do,” she said, “his daughter.” “Maybe,” I said, my shoulder alive. When she returned with the knockwurst, she said, “His daughter, some fine writer, eh?” I said I didn’t know, my shoulder now healed. She said, “What kind of talk is that? You don’t know a fine writer when you hear a fine writer?” “Where does Mr. Aarons live?” I said, hoping to get things going in a better direction. “Do I go there?” she said. “He comes here.” Well, in the next twenty minutes, by the time I had indigestion, it turned out it was your father she was talking about who, by coincidence, two hours later, called me to say that he had seen Julia.
I don’t know why I tell you this, but somewhere, of course, I must wish to make you feel guilty.
It’s a delightful letter, isn’t it? I have a pile of her letters. When I look through them, it all comes back to me—how much I’d loved the early letters, how charmed I’d been, how flattered, how much less charming they began to seem, how burdensome they became, and then, finally, how boring.
The story of love.
Here was a thing Lillian
liked to do: the T.L. Most people nowadays don’t know what a T.L. is, but my mother had taught us the expression, although I can’t imagine why.
T.L. stands for Trade Last, and here’s how it works: you call someone up and tell her you have a T.L. for her. This means you’ve heard a compliment about her—and you will repeat it—but only if she first tells you a compliment someone has said about you. In other words, you will pass along a compliment, but only if you trade it last.
This, needless to say, is a strange, ungenerous, and seriously narcissistic way to tell someone a nice thing that has been said about them.
“Miss Ephron,” she would say when she called, “it’s Miss Hellman. I have a T.L. for you.”
The first few times this happened, I was happy to play—the air was full of nice things about Lillian. She was the girl of the year. But as time passed, the calls became practically nightmarish. Everything was starting to catch up with her. She’d written another book, Scoundrel Time, a self-aggrandizing work about her decision not to testify before HUAC, and followed it with her somewhat problematical decision to pose for a Blackglama mink ad. People were talking about her, but not in any way that gave me something to trade. Not that I was hearing much of it—I was living in Washington, and people in Washington don’t talk about anyone who doesn’t live in Washington, and that’s the truth.
But there she was, on the other end of the phone, waiting for me to come up with my end of the T.L. My brain would desperately race trying to think of something I could say, anything. I had to be careful, because I didn’t want to get caught in a lie. And if I made up a story, I had to be sure I was quoting a man, because despite her warmth to me, Lillian didn’t care about nice things women said about her. And I couldn’t say, “I’m in Washington, no one here is talking about you.” So I would eventually make something up, usually about how much my husband adored her (which was true). But it never really satisfied her. Because what Lillian really wanted to hear, T.L.-wise, was that I’d just spent the evening with someone like Robert Redford (to pick an imaginary episode out of the air) and that he’d confessed that he desperately wanted to sleep with her.
