The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  When my marriage ended and I moved back to New York, Lillian was shocked. She couldn’t imagine why I’d left him. She called and asked me to reconsider. She said I ought to forgive him.

  Neither my husband nor I had the remotest interest in our getting back together, but Lillian was determined, and she kept pressing me. Can’t you forgive him? I took the moment to slip out of her life.

  I told myself that I could never have gone on with the friendship because of the way Lillian had reacted to the divorce.

  Then, about a year later, a woman named Muriel Gardiner wrote a book about her life as a spy before World War II, and it became clear that Hellman had stolen her story. There was no Julia, and Lillian had never saved Europe with her little fur hat.

  I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because Lillian had turned out to be a pathological liar.

  Then Lillian sued Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar.

  And I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because I could never respect someone who had turned against the First Amendment.

  I actually did. I actually told myself that.

  But the truth is that any excuse will do when this sort of romance comes to an end. The details are just details. And the story is always the same: the younger woman idolizes the older woman; she stalks her; the older woman takes her up; the younger woman finds out the older woman is only human; the story ends.

  If the younger woman is a writer, she eventually writes something about the older woman.

  And then years pass.

  And she herself gets older.

  And there are moments when she would like to apologize—at least for the way it ended.

  And this may be one of them.

  —November 2010

  Jan Morris: Conundrum

  AS I SUPPOSE everyone knows by now, James Morris was four years old and sitting under the piano listening to his mother play Sibelius when he was seized with the irreversible conviction that he ought to have been born a girl. By the age of nine, he was praying nightly for the miracle. “Let me be a girl. Amen.” He went on to the army, became a journalist, climbed Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, won awards for his books, and had four children with a wife who knew that all he really wanted was a sex change. Almost two years ago, he went off to a clinic in Casablanca that had dirty floors, shaved off his pubic hair, “and went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye and a wink of luck.” The wink of luck did that other self no good at all: the next morning, it was lopped off, and James Morris woke up to find himself as much a woman as hormones and surgery could make him. He promptly sold his dinner jacket and changed his name.

  This entire mess could doubtless have been avoided had James Morris been born an Orthodox Jew (in which case he could have adopted the standard Jewish prayer thanking God for not making him a woman) or had he gone to see a good Freudian analyst, who might have realized that any young boy sitting under a piano was probably looking up his mother’s skirt. But no such luck. James Morris has become Jan Morris, an Englishwoman who wears sweater sets and pearls, blushes frequently, bursts into tears at the littlest things, and loves having a gossip with someone named Mrs. Weatherby. Mrs. Weatherby, Morris writes, “really is concerned … about my migraine yesterday; and when I examine myself I find that I am no less genuinely distressed to hear that Amanda missed the school outing because of her ankle.”

  Conundrum is Jan Morris’s book about her experience, and I read it with a great deal of interest, largely because I always wanted to be a girl, too. I, too, felt that I was born into the wrong body, a body that refused, in spite of every imprecation and exercise I could manage, to become anything but the boyish, lean thing it was. I, too, grew up wishing for protectors, strangers to carry my bags, truck drivers to whistle out windows. I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be—feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft-spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half-bad at being a woman. In contrast, Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old Cosmopolitan girl. To wit:

  “So I well understand what Kipling had in mind, about sisters under the skin. Over coffee a lady from Montreal effuses about Bath—‘I don’t know if you’ve done any traveling yourself’ (not too much, I demurely lie) ‘but I do feel it’s important, don’t you, to see how other people really live.’ I bump into Jane W——in the street, and she tells me about Archie’s latest excess—‘Honestly, Jan, you don’t know how lucky you are.’ I buy some typing paper—‘How lovely to be able to write, you make me feel a proper dunce’—and walking home again to start work on a new chapter, find that workmen are in the flat, taking down a picture-rail. One of them has knocked my little red horse off the mantelpiece, chipping its enameled rump. I restrain my annoyance, summon a fairly frosty smile, and make them all cups of tea, but I am thinking to myself, as they sheepishly help themselves to sugar, a harsh feminist thought. It would be a man, I think. Well it would, wouldn’t it?”

  It is a truism of the women’s movement that the exaggerated concepts of femininity and masculinity have done their fair share to make a great many people unhappy, but nowhere is this more evident than in Jan Morris’s mawkish and embarrassing book. I first read of Morris in a Sunday New York Times Magazine article that brought dignity and real sensitivity to Morris’s obsession. But Morris’s own sensibility is so giddy and relentlessly cheerful that her book has almost no dignity at all. What she has done in it is to retrace his/her life (I am going to go crazy from the pronouns and adjectives here) by applying sentimental gender judgments to everything. Oxford is wonderful because it is feminine. Venice is sublime because it is feminine. Statesmen are dreadful because they are masculine. “Even more than now,” Morris writes of his years as a foreign correspondent, “the world of affairs was dominated by men. It was like stepping from cheap theater into reality, to pass from the ludicrous goings-on of minister’s office or ambassador’s study into the private house behind, where women were to be found doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures, or writing home.”

  And as for sex—but let Morris tell you about men and women and sex. “You are doubtless wondering, especially if you are male, what about sex? … One of the genuine and recurrent surprises of my life concerns the importance to men of physical sex…. For me the actual performance of the sexual act seemed of secondary importance and interest. I suspect this is true for most women…. In the ordinary course of events [the sex act] struck me as slightly distasteful, and I could imagine it only as part of some grand act, a declaration of absolute interdependence, or even a sacrifice.”

  Over the years, Morris saw a number of doctors, several of whom suggested he try homosexuality. (He had tried it several times before, but found it aesthetically unpleasant.) A meeting was arranged with the owner of a London art gallery. “We had a difficult lunch together,” Morris writes, “and he made eyes at the wine waiter over the fruit salad.” The remark is interesting, not just because of its hostility toward homosexuals but also because Jan Morris now makes exactly those same sorts of eyes at wine waiters—on here of her book, in fact.

  As James turns into a hermaphrodite and then into Jan, the prose in the book, which is cloying enough to begin with, turns into a kind of overembellished, simile-laden verbiage that makes the style of Victorian women novelists seem spare. Exclamation points and italicized words appear with increasing frequency. Everything blushes. James Morris blushes. His “small breasts blossomed like blushes.” He starts talking to the flowers and wishing them a Happy Easter. He becomes even more devoted to animals. He is able for the first time (“the scales dropped from my eyes”) to look
out a plane window and see things on the ground below not as cars and homes seen at a distance but “Lo! … as dolls’ houses and dinky toys.” Shortly before the operation, he and his wife, Elizabeth, whose understanding defies understanding, take a trip, both as women, through Oregon. “How merrily we traveled!” Morris writes. “What fun the Oregonians gave us! How cheerfully we swapped badinage with boatmen and lumberjacks, flirtatious garage hands and hospitable trappers! I never felt so liberated, or more myself, nor was I ever more fond of Elizabeth. ‘Come on in, girls,’ the motel men would say, and childish though I expect it sounds to you, silly in itself, perhaps a little pathetic, possibly grotesque, still if they had touched me with an accolade of nobility, or clad me ceremonially in crimson, I could not have been more flattered.” The only thing Morris neglects to write into this passage is a little face with a smile on it.

  Morris is infuriatingly vague about the reactions of her children (she blandly insists they adjusted perfectly) and of Elizabeth (she says they are still the closest of friends). “I am not the first,” Morris writes, “to discover that one recipe for an idyllic marriage is a blend of affection, physical potency and sexual incongruity.” (Idyllic marriage? Where your husband becomes a lady? I suppose we owe this to creeping Harold-and-Vitaism; still, it is one of the more ridiculous trends of recent years to confuse great friendships with great marriages; great marriages are when you have it all.) As for her new sex life, Jan Morris lyrically trills that her sexuality is now unbounded. But how?

  Unfortunately, she is a good deal more explicit about the details of what she refers to as “truly the symptoms of womanhood.” “The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became,” she writes. “I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly, incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself…. I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them…. I did not particularly want to be good at reversing cars, and did not in the least mind being patronized by illiterate garage-men, if it meant they were going to give me some extra trading stamps…. And when the news agent seems to look at me with approval, or the man in the milk-cart smiles, I feel absurdly elated, as though I have been given a good review in the Sunday Times. I know it is nonsense, but I cannot help it.”

  The truth, of course, is that Jan Morris does not know it is nonsense. She thinks that is what it is about. And I wonder about all this, wonder how anyone in this day and age can think that this is what being a woman is about. And as I wonder, I find myself thinking a harsh feminist thought. It would be a man, I think. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

  —June 1974

  Pat Loud: No, But I Read the Book

  I SUPPOSE IT is completely presumptuous for me to write even one word on the saga of Pat and Bill and Lance and Kevin and Grant and Delilah and Michele Loud. Last year, I managed to miss every single episode of An American Family. But I did catch the Louds on the talk shows, and it seemed to me at the time that, with the possible exception of Tiny Tim, no group of people had ever passed so quickly from being celebrities to being freaks. I was amazed at the amount of time they lingered on, being analyzed in print, taking up space on the air, stealing valuable time from any number of people I would prefer to have read about or seen, even including Shecky Greene. Finally, though, like a toothache, the Louds went away. And the other day, when Pat Loud’s book arrived in the mail, I felt terrible that I had not spent the months of their absence grateful for it; it is always easier to have a toothache return when you have at least had the sense to appreciate how wonderful it was not to have had one.

  Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story was written by Mrs. Loud with Nora Johnson, and the publicity director at Coward, McCann & Geoghegan assures me that its style—which is slick and show-biz rat-a-tat-tat—reflects Mrs. Loud’s way of speaking exactly. “Gloria was a lamb chop.” “Rose gardens he doesn’t walk through.” Like that. The book itself is sad and awful, and at times quite fascinating and moving. All these adjectives ring a bell: it seems to me that they were applied to the television series as well. In fact, the only thing about Pat Loud’s book that is different from the television series that propelled her into her book contract is that no one who reads it will ever wonder Why She Did It. She did it because she wanted to tell her side. She did it because she had very little else to do. And she did it because she has come to believe that her brand of letting-it-all-hang-out candor is valuable to others in her position. Will she ever learn?

  “Every other writer and cocktail circuit sociologist is contemplating the problem of the 46-year-old mother-housewife who suddenly isn’t needed anymore,” Mrs. Loud writes. “But most of these ‘problem women’ never had what has saved me, at least so far, from that devastating moment of truth: instant fame.” The television show may not have saved Pat Loud from the truth—her own head seems to have done that job perfectly well. But the experience certainly confused her, and confused the issues involved to boot. Pat Loud’s book is not the straight I-found-myself-through-divorce women’s lib confessional; her case is too unusual. Rather, it is a rambling, perplexing, contradictory account by a woman who is trying, and failing, to make some sense out of a series of events that probably defy sensible explanation.

  The real story of the Loud marriage, as told in this book, is a good deal more complicated and tacky, mainly tacky, than what I gather came out in the television series. The Louds and their five children lived in Santa Barbara, California, Pat working hard at being Supermom, Bill at his strip-mining-equipment business. As the marriage went on and the number of children increased, Mrs. Loud began finding telltale clues around the house. First a love letter to Bill from another woman, then a loose glove in his suitcase, lipstick on his handkerchiefs, a brochure from a Las Vegas hotel. The love letter enraged her so that she packed her four children into the family car—she was pregnant with the fifth—and drove off into the night. As it turned out, she did not get very far; Mrs. Loud, who has no selectivity index whatsoever, explains: “When I’m pregnant, I have the trots all the time, and sometimes it’s really essential to get to a john fast … and there wasn’t any gas station…. So finally I turned around and went home.” In 1966, she found a set of her husband’s cuff links, engraved “To Bill, Eternally Yours, Kitty,” and all hell broke loose. Her husband assured her he had bought the cuff links in a pawn shop, but she did not believe him. So she snuck off, had an extra set of his office keys made, and while he was off on a business trip she went to look through his files.

  “It was all there,” she writes, “as though it had been waiting for me for years—credit card slips telling of restaurants I’d never been to and hotels I’d never stayed at, plane tickets to places I’d never seen, even pictures of Bill and his girls as they grinned and screwed their way around the countryside.”

  Bill Loud returned from his business trip. Pat Loud slugged him, in front of the children. He slugged her back, in front of the children. They both went to see a psychiatrist. They both stopped seeing the psychiatrist. They spent night after night getting drunk as Bill Loud recited the intimate sexual details of his infidelities. The subject of open marriage was introduced. Pat Loud began going to local bars during lunch and picking up businessmen. “We would have a few drinks and some tortillas,” she recalls. “Then we would let nature take its course.” She threatened divorce. He started seeing his women again. And in the midst of this idyllic existence, Craig Gilbert, a filmmaker with a contract from public television, came into their home and told them he was looking for “an attractive, articulate California family” to do a one-hour special about.

  It is impossible to read this book and not suspect that Craig Gilbert knew exactly what he was doing when he picked the Louds, knew after ten minutes with them and the clinking ice in their drinks that he had found the perfect fami
ly to show exactly what he must have intended to show all along—the emptiness of American family life. Occasionally, in the course of this book, Pat Loud starts to suspect this, nibbles around it, yaps like a puppy at the ankles of truth, then tosses the idea aside in favor of loftier philosophical pronouncements. “If he knew it,” she concludes, “it was not necessarily because he actively smelled it about us, but because he knew in a way what we didn’t—that life is lousy and it’s tragic and it’s supposed to be and you can pretend otherwise if you want, but if you do, you’re wrong.”

  Gilbert had no trouble persuading the Louds to cooperate. Bill had always been outgoing and exhibitionistic. Pat, for her part, saw the show as a way to appear as she had always wanted to—the perfect mother, cheerfully beating egg whites in her copper bowls. When Gilbert informed them that the show was going to be so good that he would shoot enough for five specials and then twelve, the Louds consented, apparently without a tremor of anxiety.

  “Of course,” Pat Loud writes, “if you’re going to be in print or on the radio or TV, you can’t help thinking of all the people who will read or see you, and the first ones I thought of were all Bill’s women. There they would sit in frowzy little rented rooms scattered about California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, little gifts from Bill here and there, a memento from some trip or something he’d bought them, pathetic scraps of forgotten pleasure in their failed and lonely worlds. Their bleached blond hair would be falling sloppily out of its hairpins and their enormous breasts would be falling equally sloppily out of their torn, spotty negligees as they clutched their glasses of Scotch and rested their fat ankles on footstools to relieve their aching, varicose veins…. In pathetic, panting interest they would turn on their televisions to look at the Louds, and they would weep…. If they’d had Bill for a few hours or days, if they’d had a few sessions of what they probably thought of as blinding ecstasy, I had had him a thousand times more.”