The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  My favorite thing Calacanis said is that he thought the New York Times was idiotic to charge people to read op-ed material, that the paper was putting up a wall around part of their product, and as a result, the Times’s columnists wouldn’t even be Google-able. Apparently the worst thing that can happen to you in the history of the world if you are a blogger is to not be easily accessible on Google. By the way, Calacanis told everyone to buy Google stock.

  Wonkette spent some time drawing a distinction between bloggers and journalists. I think she said you could be a journalist but not write journalism, or else she said you could be in journalism but not be a journalist. She definitely said a blogger could perform an act of journalism without being a journalist exactly. It was sort of existential and reminded me of the question “Is a play a play if it isn’t being performed?” She also spoke eloquently about drinking, being drunk, being hungover, and never being anywhere without a miniature bottle of Jim Beam. She was fantastically fast and funny, and if I were a straight man or a gay woman I would have gotten a huge, pathetic crush on her. She has written a novel and showed me the manuscript, which was in her tote bag. Her tote bag was pretty messy, and so was mine, so that made things even more exciting. I don’t have a clue how she has had time to write a novel, what with the blogging and the drinking, but I guess you save a lot of time not having to do any reporting.

  As for Ken Lerer, he said that the Internet and the explosion of blogs isn’t really new, it’s just the next new thing to evolve, sort of like what happened two hundred years ago when people first started writing broadsides and pamphlets. I completely disagree with this, although I didn’t raise my hand during the question period to say so for fear that I would start coughing again. But I happen to think the Internet is a cosmic, seismic, amazing change, unlike anything that’s gone before. Way more than television, it’s changing the culture, it’s changing the way people think, it’s changing the way their brains work, it’s changing pretty much everything. Although it doesn’t seem to have changed panel discussions.

  —September 28, 2005

  On Bill Clinton

  I BROKE UP with Bill a long time ago. It’s always hard to remember love—years pass and you say to yourself, was I really in love or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love or was I just desperate? But when it came to Bill, I’m pretty sure it was the real deal. I loved the guy.

  As for Bill, I have to be honest: he did not love me. In fact, I never even crossed his mind. Not once. But in the beginning that didn’t stop me. I loved him, I believed in him, and I didn’t even think he was a liar. Of course, I knew he’d lied about his thing with Gennifer, but at the time I believed that lies of that sort didn’t count. How stupid was that?

  Anyway, I fell out of love with Bill early in the game—over gays in the military. That was in 1993, after he was inaugurated, and at that moment my heart turned to stone. People use that expression and mean it metaphorically, but if your heart can turn to stone and not have it be metaphorical, that’s how stony my heart was where Bill was concerned. I’d had faith in him. I’d been positive he’d never back down. How could he? But then he did, he backed down just like that. He turned out to be just like the others. So that was it. Goodbye, big guy. I’m out of here. Don’t even think about calling. And by the way, if your phone rings and your wife answers and the caller hangs up, don’t think it’s me because it’s not.

  By the time Bill got involved with Monica, you’d have thought I was past being hurt by him. You’d have thought I’d have shrugged and said, I told you so, you can’t trust the guy as far as you can spit. But much to my surprise, Bill broke my heart all over again. I couldn’t believe how betrayed I felt. He’d had it all, he’d had everything, and he’d thrown it away, and here’s the thing: it wasn’t his to throw away. It was ours. We’d given it to him, and he’d squandered it.

  Years passed. I’d sit around with friends at dinner talking about How We Got Here and Whose Fault Was It? Was it Nader’s fault? Or Gore’s? Or Scalia’s? Even Monica got onto the list, because after all, she delivered the pizza, and that pizza was truly the beginning of the end. Most of my friends had a hard time narrowing it down to a choice, but not me: only one person was at fault, and it was Bill. I drew a straight line from that pizza to the war. The way I saw it, if Bill had behaved, Al would have been elected, and thousands and thousands of people would be alive today who are instead dead.

  I bring all this up because I bumped into Bill the other day. I was watching the Sunday news programs, and there he was. I have to say, he looked good. And he was succinct, none of that wordy blah-blah thing that used to drive me nuts. He’d invited a whole bunch of people to a conference in New York and they’d spent the week talking about global warming, and poverty, and all sorts of obscure places he knows a huge amount about.

  When Bill described the conference, it was riveting. I could see how much he cared; and of course, I could see how smart he was. It was so refreshing. It was practically moving. To my amazement, I could even see why I’d loved the guy in the first place. It made me sadder than I can say. It’s much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.

  Then, later in the week, I was reading about Bill’s conference, and I came upon something that made me think, for just a moment, that Bill might even want me back. “I’ve reached an age now where it doesn’t matter whatever happens to me,” he said. “I just don’t want anyone to die before their time anymore.” It almost really got to me. But then I came to my senses. And instead I just wanted to pick up the phone and call him and say, if you genuinely believe that, you hypocrite, why don’t you stand up and take a position against this war?

  But I’m not calling. I haven’t called in years and I’m not starting now.

  —September 29, 2005

  A Million Little Embellishments

  THERE ARE A lot of bad things going on in the world this week, but Angelina and Brad are not among them. For one thing, I actually know who Angelina and Brad are. She has huge lips, and those lips stay pretty much the same no matter what. Even when Angelina dyes her hair blond, I know it’s her. Also, there’s the baby, stapled to her midsection, which is a fashion accessory that I’m sure will last long after her youngest child is old enough to run in a marathon; this, too, helps me identify her, and I am grateful.

  Today’s paper says Angelina is pregnant. I’m a little shocked but I’m dealing with it. Last week I read in Us magazine that Brad and Angelina were fighting over whether to become pregnant, and that Angelina’s position on the question was that she was not willing to become pregnant if there was even one orphan left in the world. I loved that! I really got into that! It was so Angelina! Of course, it turns out not to be “true” in the literal sense of the word, which is to say that it seems unlikely Angelina actually “said” those words last week, or meant them if she did say them, but so what? Why carp over details? Who cares? It’s the kind of thing Angelina might have said at some point. And at least I know what the woman looks like.

  Which is more than I can say for Britney. Who is Britney? What has she done to have so many blowsy pictures of herself in magazines? I usually know it’s Britney because her name is right next to her picture, but I feel as if I walked in late in the plot of her life, and no one bothered to explain to me what she’s doing here, much less why she spells her name that way. Is she the one involved with Kevin Federline or someone else? I’ll tell you who I really miss: that country singer who married Renée Zellweger. I liked that guy because he looked exactly like Renée in a hat, so you could pretty much tell who he was, but he lasted only a second and then he was gone. Oh well.

  Meanwhile, I was planning to read the piece about Lindsay Lohan and her anorexia in this month’s Vanity Fair. I sort of know who Lind-say Lohan is; she’s the one with the horrible father. Or else she’s the one with the horrible stepfather.
Father, stepfather, it’s a detail. But yesterday, just as I was about to read the article, Lindsay issued a statement through her publicist claiming that she did not say many of the quotes that are attributed to her in it. What is this woman’s problem? Why bother denying quotes? No one cares whether what she said is true or not: Get with it, girl! And if she’s truly into denying things, why not claim she had nothing whatsoever to do with the photographs either? Since the photographs don’t look like Lindsay Lohan, why not claim they’re actually of someone else, like an Olsen twin? Why stop there? Why not claim the pictures are of that person who poses for pictures of JT LeRoy? Of course Lindsay Lohan has probably never heard of JT LeRoy. But neither had I until very recently.

  Which brings me to James Frey and his best-selling book A Million Little Pieces. I meant to read that book. I have a sneaker for books on the best-seller list, and I’m a fairly pathetic follower of Oprah, who turned Frey’s book into a best seller. Last summer, along with thousands of other slavish Oprah acolytes, I read Anna Karenina, and let me tell you that is one swell book. By the way, Anna Karenina is a novel. That means it’s fiction. But why get hung up on such distinctions? No one else does. Frey himself was on Larry King last night, with his mother no less, and he said, “In the memoir genre the writer generally takes liberties.” What a great quote! And he came right out and admitted he changed a few “details.” In his book, for example, Frey says he spent three months in jail, but it turns out he spent only one night in jail. In his book he says he was arrested for smoking crack, but it turns out he was arrested for being drunk. I’m with Oprah, who called the Larry King show to support Frey, and said that the whole concern over whether he was telling the truth or not was just “much ado about nothing.” I feel the same way about what the president says about how we’re doing in the war. I mean, big deal. We have got to get past these details and focus on what is important.

  And by the way, how great that Frey let his mother—who undoubtedly at some point encouraged him in his gift for a million little embellishing details—appear on the Larry King show with him. Now if I could just get Frey’s face straight in my head I’d be completely happy.

  —January 12, 2006

  Scooter, Rosa Lopez, and the Grassy Knoll

  I HAVE A small dog, a Chihuahua, and I know exactly when we got her. It was during O. J., and the reason I know this is that for a while, we thought about naming the dog Rosa Lopez. Rosa Lopez, in case you’ve forgotten, was the housekeeper who lived across the street from O. J. Simpson, on Rockingham; she testified in a famously incoherent way at the first trial. I remember her name because of the dog we didn’t name her after, but I’ve managed to forget nearly everything else I ever knew about the Simpson murder case, and let me tell you, I knew a lot; I knew just about all there was to know, and every bit of it was lodged in my head, in a part of my brain that I now think of as the grassy knoll.

  The O. J. Simpson case was not the beginning of my life on the grassy knoll; Watergate was. I never really got it about the actual, original, mother-of-all-grassy-knolls—the grassy knoll itself, in Dallas, Texas. I was a reporter at the New York Post the day JFK was shot, and for years afterward I believed that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, acting alone. At the time, in 1963, I was a journalist, and I had an instinctive contempt for conspiracy theory. Most things that were thought of as conspiracies were—in my opinion—a series of incompetent acts coming together in a perfect storm. (It was especially easy to believe in the power of incompetent acts if you worked at the New York Post in that period.) So I never became a student of trajectories and how many bullet fragments and the role of Carlos Marcello and any of the rest of it, even after certain aspects of a conspiracy theory became somewhat compelling.

  Then along came Watergate. Watergate was a revelation. It was an honest-to-God conspiracy, and the detail that clinched it was the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. When the people behind the Watergate burglary turned out to be behind the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s months earlier, I realized that my natural antipathy to conspiracy was something I would probably have to give up: life was coming up with way too much evidence on the other side. My brain instantly expanded and made room for vast quantities of sheer speculation, narrative scenarios that led nowhere, and useless bits of information. I knew the name of Chuck Colson’s wife, I knew the details of Ken Clawson’s circumcision, and I knew so much about Howard Hunt that I eventually came to believe it was a shame I had never really become an expert on the Kennedy assassination because, no question, he was involved in it but it was too late for me to figure out how. Howard Hunt was truly Zelig, it seemed to me, and if you turned over almost any rock in American life from November 22, 1963, to the Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972, you’d find him lurking underneath.

  (Eventually, I came to believe the same thing about Lucianne Goldberg, who first crossed my consciousness in the early days of the women’s movement, when she was one member of a two-member organization that opposed feminism and whose motto was “A lamb chop, not a karate chop.” Later she popped up in Watergate, as part of a dirty-tricks team, and then of course she was a key figure in Monicagate, which it’s no exaggeration to say would never have happened but for her.)

  Anyway, this week, as I welcomed Plamegate back to the news cycle—and back to my brain—I realized that I’d somehow managed to forget exactly what Scooter Libby was under indictment for. Yes, I know: lying. But about what? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t believe it. Back in October I knew everything about Plamegate, I even knew the name of Judy Miller’s new dog, and now I’d forgotten exactly what it was Libby was under indictment for.

  My grassy knoll is full. It is crammed to bursting. Jared Paul Stern just turned up, and he’s trying to sell Anita Busch a T-shirt, but she’s busy because she just found a dead fish on her car windshield. There’s a Woodstock typewriter, and a pumpkin patch, both left there by my parents, and somewhere David Greenglass is lurking. Leslie Abramson just wandered off; where did she go? What happened to her? Jean Harris will be here soon, under the influence of drugs given to her by Dr. Herman Tarnower. Kato Kaelin is doing a commercial for No Excuses jeans. Monica is on the way, wearing a purple thong. Ron Perelman isn’t going to hire her; he’s giving the job to Richard Johnson’s fiancée instead. Hillary is upstairs in the residential quarters; she’s just discovered a big box of papers she thought she’d lost. In some way, Tim Russert is involved, but no one knows how; meanwhile, let’s blame him for asking the wrong questions on Sunday. Will Anthony Pellicano rat out Bert Fields? Is Bert Fields upset because Howard Weitzman walked out of his law firm? Will Michael Ovitz go to jail? Is Katie Holmes pregnant or is it a beach ball? Did George Bush have a clue what Scooter Libby was going to say to Judy Miller? Is Dick Cheney behind everything? Does Richard Perle ever lose a night’s sleep? Does Jack Bauer ever go to the bathroom? I’m dizzy. I’m overloaded. Too much is happening.

  —April 11, 2006

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

  Try to imagine what it would be like.

  They said it would be easy but it turned out to be hard.

  They said everyone would love you but it turns out they don’t.

  They said Dick Cheney would take care of everything, but he screwed everything up.

  They said, just stand next to Tony Blair and let him do the talking, but whenever he did, you looked like a moron.

  They said it would be a piece of cake, but it turned out to be a quagmire.

  They said it would cost $50 billion, but it’s costing $400 billion.

  They said it would be good for Israel, they said slam dunk, they said dancing in the streets, they said minimal casualties.

  Try to imagine what it would be like.

  And then you tell me how it’s possible for anyone under these conditions to have a resting heart rate of forty-six beats per minute.

  And yet he does. How is it possible?<
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  —August 1, 2006

  My Weekend in Vegas

  A COUPLE OF weekends ago, we went to Las Vegas. It was a small group of us who can never get enough Vegas. We stayed at the Wynn, where we always stay. We like the Wynn and we like Steve and Elaine Wynn, who own the Wynn, and we like the breakfast buffet at the Wynn, which is the greatest breakfast buffet in Las Vegas and therefore in the world. It’s even better than the breakfast buffet at the Bellagio Hotel, which Steve Wynn used to own. The day you die and go to heaven, there will not be a breakfast buffet as good as the one at the Wynn.

  We got there Friday night and went straight to dinner at the SW Steakhouse, which is of course named after Steve Wynn. I’d never been there. It has a strip steak that I honestly thought was the finest steak of my life, and let me tell you, I eat a lot of steak. (This reminds me, someone at our table ordered a steak made of grass-fed beef; it was the second time I’d had grass-fed beef in less than a week, it’s become a big trend, and may I say that someone should stamp out grass-fed beef because it has no taste whatsoever.) Anyway, while we were eating, Steve and Elaine Wynn stopped by the table. Wynn was in a very good mood because, he told us, he had just sold a Picasso for $139 million. I was surprised he’d sold it, because the Picasso in question was not just any old Picasso but the famous painting Le Rêve, which used to hang in the museum at the Bellagio when Wynn owned it, and no question it was Wynn’s favorite painting. He’d practically named his new hotel after it, but at some point in the course of construction he’d changed his mind and decided to name the hotel after himself, which, when you think of it, was a good idea, what with the homonym and all. Meanwhile, he named the Cirque de Soleil show at the Wynn after Le Rêve.