by Nora Ephron
And there were stories, the stories we grew up on. How my parents met and fell in love. How they ran away from the camp where they were counselors and got married so they could sleep in the same tent. How my mother’s aunt Minnie became the first woman dentist in the history of the world. And finally—and this is where this is all leading—how my mother threw Lillian Ross out of our house.
This was not just a story, it was a legend.
It seemed that Lillian Ross had come to one of my parents’ parties. About once a year they had a big sit-down dinner for about forty people, with tables and chairs from Abbey Rents. They served their delicious food cooked by their longtime housekeeper, and my mother wore a Galanos dress bought for the occasion. All their friends were invited—Julius J. Epstein (Casablanca), Richard Maibaum (The Big Clock and, eventually, the Bond movies), Richard Breen (Dragnet), Charles Brackett (Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard), and Albert Hackett and his wife, Frances Goodrich, who had the greatest credits of all (The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Diary of Anne Frank). I would stand on the second floor and look over the banister down at the parties, and listen to Herbie Baker (The Girl Can’t Help It) play the piano after dinner. Once I caught a glimpse of Shelley Winters, who was dating Liam O’Brien (Young at Heart), and once Marge and Gower Champion turned up. That was as starry as it ever got.
One night, St. Clair McKelway was invited to one of my parents’ parties. McKelway was a well-known New Yorker magazine writer who’d written a couple of movies. He called beforehand to ask if he could bring a friend, Lillian Ross. Did my mother know who she was? he asked. My mother certainly knew who she was. The New Yorker arrived by mail every week. Along with the Sunday New York Times and the Saturday Review of Literature, it was required reading for the diaspora of smart people living in Hollywood; reading it made them feel they hadn’t lost a step, that they could move back East at a moment’s notice.
Lillian Ross was young at the time, but she was already famous for her reporting in The New Yorker, and for her ability to make her subjects sound like fools. She had just published her devastating profile of Ernest Hemingway and was in Los Angeles reporting her piece on John Huston and the making of The Red Badge of Courage. My mother told St. Clair McKelway that he was welcome to bring Lillian Ross to dinner but that Ross had to agree that the party would be off the record.
So Lillian Ross came to the party. Before dinner, she asked my mother for a tour of the house. My mother showed her around, and at a certain point, Ross came upon a picture of my three sisters and me.
“Are these your children?” she asked my mother.
“Yes,” my mother said.
“Do you ever see them?” Lillian Ross asked.
That did it.
My mother walked Lillian Ross downstairs and back to McKelway.
“Out,” she said.
And Lillian Ross and St. Clair McKelway left.
That was the legend of my mother and Lillian Ross. My mother loved to tell it. It was practically a cowboy movie. We’d been raised to believe that a woman could do everything and Lillian Ross had dared to question it. In our house. So my mother threw her out.
I loved this story. I loved all stories that proved that my mother was right and everyone else was wrong, especially since there was a piece of me that couldn’t help wishing she was exactly like everyone else’s mother.
It was at least ten years before I began to wonder about it. Had it ever actually happened? There are all sorts of stories you grow up with, and then you get older, and there’s just something about them that doesn’t pass the nose test. They’re somehow too perfect. And the most nagging part is the coup de grâce, the perfectly chosen last line. My father wrote a memoir once, and in it are several completely unbelievable episodes in which he tells people like Darryl Zanuck to go fuck themselves. This legend of my mother and Lillian Ross was in some way a version of those stories. It was too good to be true.
My mother became an alcoholic when I was fifteen. It was odd. One day she wasn’t an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush. She drank a bottle of scotch every night. Around midnight she would come flying out of her bedroom, banging and screaming and terrorizing us all. My father drank too, but he was a sloppy, sentimental drunk, and somehow his alcoholism was more benign.
By the time I went off to Wellesley, their movie work had dried up, but somehow they were sober enough in the daytime to collaborate; they wrote a successful play called Take Her, She’s Mine, about a Southern California family whose daughter goes off to an eastern women’s college. It quoted the letters I’d written from college, and it opened on Broadway during my senior year, starring Art Carney as the father and Elizabeth Ashley as the daughter. Everyone at Wellesley knew about it and about my remarkable mother, the writer who could do everything.
I didn’t expect either of my parents to turn up at my graduation, but a few days before it, my mother called to say she’d decided to come. She arrived in all her stylish glory. She wore her suit, and her three-inch heels, and her clip-on earrings that matched her brooch. She slept in the dormitory, in the room next to mine, for two nights. I lay in my bed and listened through the paper-thin wall to her drunken mutterings. I was terrified that she’d burst from her room into the halls of Tower Court and mortify me in front of my classmates, that she’d stagger down the hall banging and screaming, and my friends would learn the truth.
But what was the truth?
I was invested in the original narrative; I was a true believer. My mother was a goddess.
But my mother was an alcoholic.
Alcoholic parents are so confusing. They’re your parents, so you love them; but they’re drunks, so you hate them. But you love them. But you hate them. They have moments when they’re still the people you grew up idolizing; they have moments when you can’t imagine they were ever anything but monsters. And then, after a while, they’re monsters full-time. The people they used to be have enormous power over you—it will be forty years before you buy a red coat (and even then, you will wear it only once)—but the people they’ve turned into have no power over you at all.
For a long time before she died, I wished my mother were dead. And then she died, and it wasn’t one of those things where I thought, Why did I think that? What was wrong with me? What kind of person would wish her mother dead? No, it wasn’t one of those things at all. My mother had become a complete nightmare. She drank herself to death at the age of fifty-seven.
I was thirty when she died. After five years as a newspaper reporter, I’d become a freelance magazine writer. I wrote for Esquire in the last days of editor Harold Hayes and for New York magazine in the first days of Clay Felker. It was a heady time. Magazines like Esquire and New York were the zeitgeist, and the (mostly) men who wrote for them were cocky and full of beans. They thought they had invented nonfiction, which they hadn’t, and they even thought they had invented hanging out together in restaurants and staying up late. It was an era when people really cared about magazines, when the arrival of a new Esquire on the newsstands was a bombshell, and it was seriously fun to be part of it. I became an Esquire writer. I wrote a column there, about women. In the world of print, the small world where I lived, I became a little bit famous.
I had never met Lillian Ross, but I wondered about her from time to time. I’d read all her early work and admired it greatly, but she’d stopped doing bylined profiles and wrote mostly unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker. She was rumored to be having an affair with the editor of the magazine, William Shawn, and she seemed (from a distance) to have fallen under the evil spell of blandness that he’d cast over the magazine.
At the time, there was a cold war in the magazine world, between those of us at Esquire and New York, and those of them at The New Yorker. They lived enviable lives—they had contracts and health insurance, and they could take months writing pieces; we, on the other hand, were always overextended and scrambling for dou
gh. They were feigning modesty and disdaining success; we were self-aggrandizing and climbing the greasy pole. They were the anointed; we were pagans. They worshipped the famously reclusive “Mr. Shawn,” and they dropped his name in hushed tones as if he were the Ba’al Shem Tov; we, on the other hand, jumped from Harold to Clay and back again. They thought we were egomaniacs; we thought they were weird.
I was the sort of person Lillian Ross would hate, if she even knew who I was, or so it seemed to me one night in 1978 when I was pulled across a room to meet her. I was at a party at the home of Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live. Lillian Ross had been reporting a profile of Lorne for eight years. “You two must meet,” Lorne was saying, as he brought us together. I could see in an instant that Lillian Ross did not share this imperative. “You have so much in common,” he said, as he sat us down on the sofa.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” I said.
“And you,” she said.
She was a tiny woman with short curly hair and bright blue eyes, and she smiled and waited for me to begin.
I had one goal: to find out if my mother’s story was true and to find it out without giving anything away. I didn’t want Lillian Ross to know that she was a character in our family saga, and I didn’t want to betray my mother by giving away the fact that Ross had lingered on, in our home, for so many years after her cameo appearance there. I wanted my mother to win the duel, whether or not it had actually happened.
But how to ask the question? “Is it true my mother threw you out of the house?” seemed a little bold. “I think you once met my mother” seemed coy, especially if Ross remembered the incident.
I couldn’t figure out what to do.
So I began by saying that I was a huge fan. She said thank you and waited for me to say something else. I took this to mean she’d never read anything I’d written, or that she hated my work, or perhaps—I was reaching for straws here—she had no idea that I was a writer.
I asked her about her son and I told her about mine. It’s my experience that no one but your very close friends is truly interested in your children, but we went on pretending for a while.
Then I asked her if she was still writing the profile of Lorne, as I’d heard. Yes, she said, she was. Another pause. It was clear that Lillian Ross was not even going to meet me halfway. I was starting to become irritated. Was it true that she was now in her eighth year of writing about Lorne, I asked. Yes, she was, she said. When do you think you’ll be done with it, I asked. I asked this in what I hoped was an innocent manner, but I didn’t fool her. She had no idea, she replied. We don’t have to rush things at The New Yorker.
That cleared up one thing: she knew who I was.
I plowed on: I asked her why she’d stopped writing signed profiles. I asked the question cleverly, I thought. Honey dripped from my lips. I said I had loved her long pieces so much and missed reading them and wondered why she had stopped writing them. She replied that she’d stopped writing bylined articles because she believed that too much magazine journalism these days was egotistical and self-promoting.
I had to hand it to her: that was good.
And then Lillian Ross answered the question I hadn’t asked.
“I went to your house once,” she said. “I met your mother.”
“Really?” I said, feigning absolute ignorance.
“Didn’t see much of you, though,” she said.
So there it was.
No question.
It had happened.
I have met Lillian Ross many times since that night. She still writes for The New Yorker, although The New Yorker no longer publishes unsigned pieces. She eventually wrote a first-person confessional about her relationship with Mr. Shawn, so on some level she threw off the veil. I consider her to be as egotistical and self-promoting as the rest of us, and that’s a compliment.
But this is not about Lillian Ross, really. It’s about my mother. Long before she died, I’d given up on her. But that night with Lillian Ross, I got her back; I got back the mother I’d idolized before it had all gone to hell. I got back the simple version. She’d thrown Lillian Ross out of our house for all the right reasons. The legend was true.
—October 2010
Me and JFK: Now It Can Be Told
JFK intern admits all
John F. Kennedy’s intern admitted to the Daily News yesterday: “I am the Mimi.”
Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock, now 60, called it a huge weight off her shoulders to finally reveal her affair with the dashing young president four decades ago. “The gift for me is that this allowed me to tell my two married daughters a secret that I’ve been holding for 41 years,” she said. “It’s a huge relief. And now I will have no further comment on this subject. I request that the media respect my privacy and that of my family.”
I WAS AN intern in the JFK White House. I was. This is not one of those humor pieces where the writer pretends to some experience currently in the news in order to make an “amusing” point. It was 1961, and I was hired by Pierre Salinger to work in the White House press office, the very same place where Mimi Fahnestock was to work the following year. And now that Mimi Fahnestock has been forced to come forward and admit that she had an affair with JFK, I might as well tell my story too.
I notice that all the articles about poor Mimi quote another woman in the press office, Barbara Gamarekian, who fingered Fahnestock in the oral history archives at the Kennedy Library. Gamarekian cattily pointed out, according to the newspapers, that Mimi “couldn’t type.” Well, all I can say to that is: Ha. In fact: Double ha. There were, when I worked there, six women in Pierre Salinger’s office. One of them was called Faddle (her best friend, Fiddle, worked for Kennedy), and her entire job, as far as I could tell, was autographing Pierre Salinger’s photographs. Fiddle’s job was autographing Kennedy’s. Typing was not a skill that anyone seemed to need, and it certainly wasn’t necessary for interns like me (and Mimi, dare I say), because THERE WAS NO DESK FOR AN INTERN TO SIT AT AND THEREFORE NO TYPEWRITER TO TYPE ON.
Yes, I am still bitter about it! Because there I was, not just the only young woman in the White House who was unable to afford an endless succession of A-line sleeveless linen dresses just like Jackie’s, but also the only person in the press office with nowhere to sit. And then, as now, I could type one hundred words a minute. Every eight-hour day there were theoretically forty-eight thousand words that weren’t being typed because I DIDN’T HAVE A DESK.
Also, I had a really bad permanent wave. This is an important fact for later in the story, when things heat up.
I met the president within minutes of going to “work” in the White House. My first morning there, he flew to Annapolis to give the commencement address, and Salinger invited me to come along with the press pool in the press helicopter. When I got back to the White House, Pierre took me in to meet Kennedy. He was the handsomest man I had ever seen. I don’t remember the details of our conversation, but perhaps they are included in Salinger’s reminiscences in the Kennedy Library. Someday I will look them up. What I do remember is that the meeting was short, perhaps ten or fifteen seconds. After it, I went back to the press office and discovered what you, reader, already know: that there was no place for me to sit.
So I spent my summer internship lurking in the hall near the file cabinet. I read most of the things that were in the file cabinet, including some interesting memos that were marked “Top Secret” and “Eyes Only.” Right next to the file cabinet was the men’s room, and one day the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, inadvertently locked himself into it. Had I not been nearby, he might be there still.
From time to time I went into the Oval Office and watched the president be photographed with various foreign leaders. Sometimes, I am pretty sure, he noticed me watching him.
Which brings me to my crucial encounter with JFK, the one that no one at the Kennedy Library has come to ask me about. It was a Friday afternoon, and because I had nowhere to sit (see above) and noth
ing to do (ditto), I decided to go out and watch the president leave by helicopter for a weekend in Hyannis Port. It was a beautiful day, and I stood out under the portico overlooking the Rose Garden, just outside the Oval Office. The helicopter landed. The noise was deafening. The wind from the chopper blades was blowing hard (although my permanent wave kept my hair glued tightly to my head). And then suddenly, instead of coming out of the living quarters, the president emerged from his office and walked right past me to get to the helicopter. He turned. He saw me. He recognized me. The noise was deafening but he spoke to me. I couldn’t hear a thing, but I could read his lips, and I’m pretty sure what he said was “How are you coming along?” But I wasn’t positive. So I replied as best I could. “What?” I said.
And that was it. He turned and went off to the helicopter, and I went back to standing around the White House until the summer was over. I never saw him again.
Now that I have read the articles about Mimi Fahnestock, it has become horribly clear to me that I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the president did not make a pass at. Perhaps it was my permanent wave, which was a truly unfortunate mistake. Perhaps it was my wardrobe, which mostly consisted of multicolored Dynel dresses that looked like distilled Velveeta cheese. Perhaps it’s because I’m Jewish. Don’t laugh; think about it—think about that long, long list of women JFK slept with. Were any of them Jewish? I don’t think so.
On the other hand, perhaps nothing happened between us simply because JFK somehow sensed that discretion was not my middle name. I mean, I assure you that if anything had gone on between the two of us, you would not have had to wait this long to find it out.
