The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  I swear to God Janice Glabman will never laugh at me again

  I go off to college. I weigh 106 pounds. I come back from college three months later. I weigh 126 pounds. I was once thin and shapeless. Now I am fat and, ironically, equally shapeless. Nothing fits, except for my wool plaid Pendleton pleated skirt, which makes me look even fatter. It’s tragic. My father takes one look at me as I get off the plane and says to my mother, “Well, maybe someone will marry her for her personality.”

  I go back to college. I stay fat. There’s a machine in the dormitory cafeteria called The Cow, and when you press a nozzle, out comes the coldest, most delicious milk you’ve ever tasted. Also there are sticky buns and popovers and scones. I have never been exposed to such wonders. I love them. I have seconds. I have thirds. There’s butter everywhere you look, and of course, that cold, delicious milk. We’re not talking low-fat milk, my friends. This was so long ago no one even knew about low-fat milk.

  Anyway, months pass. I come home for the summer. I’m as fat as ever. None of my clothes fit. I already said that, and it’s still true. And because it’s summer, I can’t even wear my wool plaid Pendleton pleated skirt. So I go over to my friend Janice Glabman’s to borrow some clothes from her. Janice has always been overweight. I try on a pair of her pants. They’re too small. They’re way too small. I can’t even zip them up. Janice laughs at me. These are Janice’s exact words: “Ha ha ha ha ha.” The next day I go on a diet. In six months my weight drops back to 106. I have been on a diet ever since.

  I have not seen Janice in more than forty years, but if I do see her, I’m ready. I’m thin. Although I now weigh 126 pounds, the exact amount I weighed when I came home from college having become a butterball. I can’t explain this.

  I am not going to marry Stanley J. Fleck

  I’m working as a summer intern in the Kennedy White House, and I’m engaged to be married to a young lawyer named Stanley J. Fleck. Everyone I know is engaged to be married. My fiancé is visiting me in Washington, and I give him a tour of the White House, which I have a pass to roam freely. I show him the Red Room. I show him the Blue Room. I show him the beautiful portrait of Grace Coolidge. I show him the Rose Garden. At the end of the tour, he says, “No wife of mine is ever going to work at a place like this.”

  Sunday in the park

  I’m in a rowboat on the lake in Central Park. Fortunately I’m not rowing the boat. I’m still in college, but soon I won’t be, soon I’ll be living here, in New York City. I look up at all the buildings surrounding the park, and it crosses my mind that except for the man rowing the boat, I don’t know anyone in New York City. And I barely know the man in the boat. I wonder if I’m going to end up being one of those people you read about in newspapers, who lives in New York and never meets anyone and eventually dies and no one even notices until days later, when the smell drifts out into the hallway. I vow that someday I will know someone in New York City.

  I’m going to be a newspaper reporter forever

  It’s 1963. I’ve written a piece for a parody of the New York Post during a long newspaper strike. The editors of the Post are upset about the parody, but the publisher of the Post is amused. “If they can parody the Post, they can write for it,” she says. “Hire them.” When the strike ends, I’m given a one-week tryout at the Post. The city room is dusty, dingy, and dark. The desks are dilapidated and falling apart. It smells terrible. There aren’t enough phones. The city editor sends me to the Coney Island aquarium to cover the story of two hooded seals who’ve been brought together to mate but have refused to have anything to do with each other. I write a story. I think it’s funny. I turn it in. I hear laughter from the city desk. They think it’s funny too. I am hired permanently. I have never been happier. I have achieved my life’s ambition, and I am twenty-two years old.

  I may not be a newspaper reporter forever

  One night I go to a bar near the Post with one of my fellow reporters and the managing editor. It’s been raining. After quite a few drinks, the managing editor invites us to his home in Brooklyn Heights. When we get there, he tells me to stand on the stoop in front of the house. There’s an awning over one of the windows. As I step into position, he lowers the awning, and about ten gallons of water drench me from head to toe. He thinks this is hilarious.

  My life changes

  I write a magazine article about having small breasts. I am now a writer.

  What my mother said (2)

  I now believe that what my mother meant when she said “Everything is copy” is this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

  I think that’s what she meant.

  On the other hand, she may merely have meant, “Everything is copy.”

  When she was in the hospital, dying, she said to me, “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes.” It seems to me this is not quite the same as “Everything is copy.”

  My mother died of cirrhosis, but the immediate cause of her death was an overdose of sleeping pills administered by my father. At the time this didn’t seem to me to fall under the rubric of “Everything is copy.” Although it did to my sister Amy, and she put it into a novel. Who can blame her?

  How she died: my version

  My mother is in the hospital. Every day, my father calls and says, this is it, they’re pulling the plug. But there is no plug. My mother comes home. Several days pass. One day my father says, I’m going to give the nurse the night off. Late that night, he calls to tell me my mother has died. The funeral home has already come and taken away her body. I go to their apartment. It’s four in the morning. I sit with my father for a while, and then we both decide to take a nap before the next day begins. My father reaches into the pocket of his bathrobe and pulls out a bottle of sleeping pills. “The doctor gave me these in case I was having trouble sleeping,” he says. “Flush them down the toilet.” I go into the bathroom and flush them down the toilet. The next morning, when my sisters arrive, I tell them about the pills. My sister Amy says to me, “Did you count the pills?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Duh,” she says.

  I was married to him for six years

  My first husband is a perfectly nice person, although he’s pathologically attached to his cats. It’s 1972, the height of the women’s movement, and everyone is getting a divorce, even people whose husbands don’t have pathological attachments to their cats. My husband is planning for us to take a photo safari through Africa, and I say to him, “I can’t go on this trip.”

  “Why not?” he says.

  “Because it’s very expensive and we’re probably going to split up and I’ll feel horribly guilty that you spent all this money taking me to Africa.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” my husband says. “I love you and you love me and we’re not getting a divorce and even if we do, you’re the only person I want to go to Africa with. We’re going.”

  So we go to Africa. It’s a wonderful trip. When we come back, I tell my husband that I want a divorce. “But I took you to Africa!” he says.

  You can’t make this stuff up

  I’m working on a magazine story about a woman who was fired from her job as president of Bennington College. I have read a story about her in the New York Times that says she’s been fired—along with her husband, the vice president of Bennington—because of her brave stand against tenure. I suspect her firing has nothing to do with her brave stand against tenure, although I don’t have a clue what the real reason is. I go to Bennington and discover that she has in fact been fired because she’s been having an affair with a professor at Bennington, that they taught a class on Hawthorne together, and that they both wore matching T-shirts in class with scarlet A’s on them. What’s more, I learn that the faculty hated her from the very beginning because she had a party for them and served lukewarm lasagna and unthawed Sara Lee banana cake. I can’t get over this as
pect of journalism. I can’t believe how real life never lets you down. I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.

  Everything is copy

  I’m seven months pregnant with my second child, and I’ve just discovered that my second husband is in love with someone else. She too is married. Her husband telephones me. He’s the British ambassador to the United States. I’m not kidding. He happens to be the kind of person who tends to see almost everything in global terms. He suggests lunch. We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh, Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”

  “It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”

  I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.

  I was married to him for two years and eight months

  I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I’m a total mess and I will never be the same. I can’t stop crying. She looks at me and says, “You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.”

  On the other hand, perhaps you can make this stuff up

  So I write a novel. I change my first husband’s cats into hamsters, and I change the British ambassador into an undersecretary of state, and I give my second husband a beard.

  One of the saddest things about divorce

  My sister Delia says this, and it’s true. When we were growing up, we used to love to hear the story of how our parents met and fell in love and eloped one summer when they were both camp counselors. It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love.

  But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing.

  And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.

  A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula

  Alice Arlen and I have written a script for the movie Silkwood. It’s based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, who worked at a plutonium plant in Oklahoma; she died in a mysterious automobile accident while on her way to meet a New York Times reporter to talk about conditions in the plant. Mike Nichols is going to direct it; he was supposed to direct a Broadway musical instead, but it all fell through because he was betrayed by a close friend who was involved with the show. We will call the close friend Jane Doe for the purposes of this story.

  So we all start to work together on the next draft of the script, and Mike keeps suggesting scenes for the movie that involve Karen Silkwood’s being betrayed by a close woman friend. He has a million ideas along these lines, none of which really bear any resemblance to what happened to Karen Silkwood but all of which bear a resemblance to what happened between Mike and his friend Jane. I finally say, “Mike, Jane Doe did not kill Karen Silkwood.”

  “Yes,” Mike says, “I see what you’re saying. It’s the peninsula story.”

  And he tells us the peninsula story:

  A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula. The man’s mother comes to stay with them, and the man goes off on a business trip. The woman takes the ferry to the mainland and goes to see her lover. They make love. When they finish, she realizes it’s late, and she gets up, dresses, and rushes to catch the last ferry home. But she misses the boat. She pleads with the ferryboat captain. He tells her he will take her back to the peninsula if she gives him six times the normal fare. But she doesn’t have the money. So she’s forced to walk home, and on the way, she’s raped and killed by a stranger.

  And the question is: Who is responsible for her death, and in what order—the woman, the man, the mother, the ferryboat captain, the lover, or the rapist?

  The question is a Rorschach, Mike says, and if you ask your friends to answer it, they will all answer differently.

  Another lightbulb moment.

  This one marks the end of my love affair with journalism and the beginning of my understanding that just about everything is a story.

  Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly

  “I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.”

  From my script for When Harry Met Sally

  HARRY: Why don’t you tell me the story of your life?

  SALLY: The story of my life?

  HARRY: We’ve got eighteen hours to kill before we hit New York.

  SALLY: The story of my life isn’t even going to get us out of Chicago. I mean, nothing’s happened to me yet. That’s why I’m going to New York.

  HARRY: So something can happen to you?

  SALLY: Yes.

  HARRY: Like what?

  SALLY: Like I’m going to go to journalism school to become a reporter.

  HARRY: So you can write about things that happen to other people.

  SALLY: (After a beat.) That’s one way to look at it.

  HARRY: Suppose nothing happens to you. Suppose you live there your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anyone, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway.

  A guy walks into a restaurant

  I’m having dinner at a restaurant with friends. A man I know comes over to the table. He’s a famously nice guy. His marriage broke up at about the same time mine did. He says, “How can I find you?”

  We can’t do everything

  I’m sitting in a small screening room waiting for a movie to begin. The room fills up. There aren’t enough seats. People are bunching up in the aisles and looking around helplessly. I’m next to my friend Bob Gottlieb, watching all this. The director of the movie decides to solve the problem by asking all the children at the screening to share seats. I watch in mounting frustration. Finally, I say to Bob, “It’s really very simple. Someone should go get some folding chairs and set them up in the aisles.”

  Bob looks at me. “Nora,” he says, “we can’t do everything.”

  My brain clears in an amazing way.

  Nora. We can’t do everything.

  I have been given the secret of life.

  Although it’s probably a little late.

  And by the way

  The other day I bought a red coat, on sale. But I haven’t worn it yet.

  —August 2006

  The Legend

  I GREW UP in Beverly Hills, in a Spanish house in the flats. My parents had a large group of friends, almost all of them transplanted New Yorkers who were in the business. That’s what it was known as—the business. (People who were not in the business were known as civilians.) The men were screenwriters or television writers. Their wives did nothing. They were known at the time as housewives, but none of them did housework—they all had cooks and maids and laundresses. Our mother had household help too, but she was different: she worked. “You’ll just have to tell them your mother can’t be there because she has to work.” My mother uttered that sentence several times a year; it was meant to get her off the hook for PTA meetings and such, but it was also meant to make us understand that she was a cut above the other mothers. She was even a cut above the other career women—there were a few in the business, including the costume designer Edith Head, whom my mother once took me to lunch with, but none of them had careers and children. My mother did. Also, she served delicious food, which was another way she liked to rub it in. And she could keep help. What’s more, she dressed beautifully.

  This was long before the concept of having it all, but my mother had it all. And then she ruined the narrative by becoming a crazy drunk. But that came later.

  Every day my parents came home from work, and we all gathered in the
den. My parents had drinks and there were crudités for us—although they were not called crudités at the time, they were called carrots and celery. Then we had dinner in the dining room. The plates were heated, and there were butter balls made with wooden paddles. There was an appetizer, a main course, and dessert. We thought everyone lived like this.

  At our dinner table, we discussed politics and what we were reading. We told cheerful stories of what had happened in school that day. We played charades. My mother, once a camp counselor, would lead us in song. “Under the spreading chestnut tree,” we would sing, and we would spread our arms and bang our chests. Or we would sing, “The bells they all go tingalingaling,” and we’d clink our spoons against our glasses. We learned to believe in Lucy Stone, the New Deal, Norman Thomas, and Edward R. Murrow. We were taught that organized religion was the root of all evil and that Adlai Stevenson was God. We were indoctrinated in my mother’s rules: Never buy a red coat. Red meat keeps your hair from turning gray. You can leave the table but you may not leave the table. Girdles ruin your stomach muscles. The means and the end are the same.