The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  I have never told anyone the exact details of my particular sex fantasy: it is my only secret and I am not going to divulge it here. I once told almost all of it to my former therapist; he died last year, and when I saw his obituary I felt a great sense of relief: the only person in the world who almost knew how crazy I am was gone and I was safe. Anyway, without giving away any of the juicy parts, I can tell you that in its broad outlines it has largely to do with being dominated by faceless males who rip my clothes off. That’s just about all they have to do. Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It’s terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

  The fantasy of rape—of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent subcategory—is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men. And what I don’t understand is that with so many of us stuck with these clichéd feminine/masculine, submissive/dominant, masochistic/sadistic fantasies, how are we ever going to adjust fully to the less thrilling but more desirable reality of equality? A few months ago, someone named B. Lyman Stewart, a urologist at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, attributed the rising frequency of impotence among his male patients to the women’s movement, which he called an effort to dominate men. The movement is nothing of the kind; but it and a variety of other events in society have certainly brought about a change in the way women behave in bed. A young man who grows up expecting to dominate sexually is bound to be somewhat startled by a young woman who wants sex as much as he does, and multi-orgasmic sex at that. By the same token, I suspect that a great deal of the difficulty women report in achieving orgasm is traceable—sadly—to the possibility that a man who is a tender fellow with implicit capabilities for impotence hardly fits into classic fantasies of big brutes with implicit capabilities for violence. A close friend who has the worst marriage I know—her husband beats her up regularly—reports that her sex life is wonderful. I am hardly suggesting that women ask their men to beat them—nor am I advocating the course apparently preferred by one of the most prominent members of the women’s movement, who makes it mainly with blue-collar workers and semiliterates. But I wonder how we will ever break free from all the nonsense we grew up with; I wonder if our fantasies can ever catch up to what we all want for our lives.

  It is possible, through sheer willpower, to stop having unhealthy sex fantasies. I have several friends who did just that. “What do you have instead?” I asked. “Nothing,” they replied. Well, I don’t know. I’m not at all sure I wouldn’t rather have an unhealthy sex fantasy than no sex fantasy at all. But my real question is whether it is possible, having discarded the fantasy, to discard the thinking and expectations it represents. In my case, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be. I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don’t. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I’m not. My husband has trouble hailing a cab or flagging a waiter, and suddenly I feel a kind of rage; ball-breaking anger rises to my T-zone. I wish he were better at hailing taxis than I am; on the other hand, I realize that expectation is culturally conditioned, utterly foolish, has nothing to do with anything, is exactly the kind of thinking that ought to be got rid of in our society; on still another hand, having that insight into my reaction does not seem to calm my irritation.

  My husband is fond of reminding me of the story of Moses, who kept the Israelites in the desert for forty years because he knew a slave generation could not found a new free society. The comparison with the women’s movement is extremely apt, I think; I doubt that it will ever be possible for the women of my generation to escape from our own particular slave mentality. For the next generation, life may indeed be freer. After all, if society changes, the fantasies will change; where women are truly equal, where their status has nothing to do with whom they marry, when the issues of masculine/feminine cease to exist, some of this absurd reliance on role playing will be eliminated. But not all of it. Because even after the revolution, we will be left with all the literature. “What will happen to the literature?” Helen Dudar of the New York Post once asked Ti-Grace Atkinson. “What does it matter what happens?” Ms. Atkinson replied. But it does. You are what you eat. After liberation, we will still have to reckon with the Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Granted there will also be a new batch of fairy tales about princesses who refuse to have ladies-in-waiting because it is exploitative of the lower classes—but that sounds awfully tedious, doesn’t it? Short of a mass book burning, which no one wants, things may well go on as they are now: women pulled between the intellectual attraction of liberation and the emotional, psychological, and cultural mishmash it’s hard to escape growing up with; men trying to cope with these two extremes, and with their own ambivalence besides. It’s not much fun this way, but at least it’s not boring.

  —July 1972

  On Maintenance

  I HAVE BEEN trying for weeks to write about maintenance, but it hasn’t been easy, and for a simple reason: Maintenance takes up so much of my life that I barely have time to sit down at the computer.

  You know what maintenance is, I’m sure. Maintenance is what they mean when they say, “After a certain point, it’s just patch patch patch.” Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don’t mean to be too literal about this. There are a couple of old boyfriends whom I always worry about bumping into, but there’s no chance—if I ever did—that I would recognize either of them. On top of which they live in other cities. But the point is that I still think about them every time I’m tempted to leave the house without eyeliner.

  There are two types of maintenance, of course. There’s Status Quo Maintenance—the things you have to do daily, or weekly, or monthly, just to stay more or less even. And then there’s the maintenance you have to do monthly, or yearly, or every couple of years or so—maintenance I think of as Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back the Clock. Into this category fall such things as face-lifts, liposuction, Botox, major dental work, and Removal of Unsightly Things—of varicose veins, for instance, and skin tags, and those irritating little red spots that crop up on your torso after a certain age for no real reason. I’m not going to discuss such issues here. For now, I’m concentrating only on the routine, everyday things required just to keep you from looking like someone who no longer cares.

  Hair

  We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

  Tell the truth. Aren’t you sick of your hair? Aren’t you tired of washing and drying it? I know people who wash their hair every day, and I don’t get it. Your hair doesn’t need to be washed every day, any more than your black pants have to be dry-cleaned every time you wear them. But no one listens to me. It takes some of my friends an hour a day, seven days a week, just to wash and blow-dry their hair. How they manage to have any sort of life at all is a mystery. I mean, we’re talking about 365 hours a year! Nine workweeks! Maybe this made sense when we were young, when the amount of time we spent making ourselves look good bore some correlation to the number of hours we spent having sex (which was, after all, one of the reasons for our spending so much time on grooming). But now that we’re older, whom are we kidding?

  On top of which, have you tried buying shampoo lately? I mean, good luck to you. Good luck finding anything that says on the label, simply, shampoo. There are shampoos for dry but oily hair and shampoos for coarse but fine hair, and then there are the conditioners and the straighteners and the volumizers. How damaged does your hair have to be to qualify as “damaged”? Why are some shampoos for blondes? Do the blondes get better shampoos than the rest of us? It’s totally dizzying, shelf after shelf of products, not one of them capable of doing the job alone.

  I deal with all this confusion by taking draconian measures to re
duce the amount of time I spend on my hair. I never do my own hair if I can help it, and I try my best to avoid situations that would require me to. Every so often a rich friend asks me if I’d like to go on a trip involving a boat, and all I can think about is the misery of five days in a small cabin struggling with a blow-dryer. And I am never going back to Africa; the last time I was there, in 1972, there were no hairdressers out in the bush, and as far as I was concerned, that was the end of that place.

  I’m in awe of the women I know who have magical haircuts that require next to no maintenance. I envy all Asian women—I mean, have you ever seen an Asian woman whose hair looks bad? (No, you haven’t. Why is this?) I once read an interview with a well-known actress who said that the thing she was proudest of was that she could blow-dry her own hair, and I was depressed for days afterward. I’m completely inept at blow-drying my own hair. I have the equipment and the products, I assure you. I own blow-dryers with special attachments, and hot rollers and Velcro rollers, and gel and mousse and spray, but my hair looks absolutely awful if I do it myself.

  So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting. What’s more, it takes much less time than washing and drying your own hair every single day, especially if, like me, you live in a large city where a good and reasonably priced hairdresser is just around the corner. Still, at the end of the year, I’ve spent at least eighty hours just keeping my hair clean and pressed. That’s two workweeks. There’s no telling what I could be doing with all that time. I could be on eBay, for instance, buying something that will turn out to be worth much less than I bid for it. I could be reading good books. Of course, I could be reading good books while having my hair done—but I don’t. I always mean to. I always take one with me when I go to the salon. But instead I end up reading the fashion magazines that are lying around, and I mostly concentrate on articles about cosmetic and surgical procedures. Once I picked up a copy of Vogue while having my hair done, and it cost me twenty thousand dollars. But you should see my teeth.

  Hair Dye

  Many years ago, when Gloria Steinem turned forty, someone complimented her on how remarkably young she looked, and she replied, “This is what forty looks like.” It was a great line, and I wish I’d said it. “This is what forty looks like” led, inevitably, to its most significant corollary, “Forty is the new thirty,” which led to many other corollaries: “Fifty is the new forty,” “Sixty is the new fifty,” and even “Restaurants are the new theater,” “Focaccia is the new quiche,” et cetera.

  Anyway, here’s the point: There’s a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye. In the 1950s only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all. (Once, some years ago, I went to Le Cirque, a well-known New York restaurant, to a lunch in honor of a woman named Jean Harris, who had just that week been released from twelve years in prison for murdering her diet-doctor boyfriend, and she was the only woman in the restaurant with gray hair.)

  Hair dye has changed everything, but it almost never gets the credit. It’s the most powerful weapon older women have against the youth culture, and because it actually succeeds at stopping the clock (at least where your hair color is concerned), it makes women open to far more drastic procedures (like face-lifts). I can make a case that it’s at least partly responsible for the number of women entering (and managing to stay in) the job market in middle and late middle age, as well as for all sorts of fashion trends. For example, it’s one of the reasons women don’t wear hats anymore, and it’s entirely the reason that everyone I know has a closet full of black clothes. Think about it. Fifty years ago, women of a certain age almost never wore black. Black was for widows, specifically for Italian war widows, and even Gloria Steinem might concede that the average Italian war widow made you believe that sixty was the new seventy-five. If you have gray hair, black makes you look not just older but sadder. But black looks great on older women with dark hair—so great, in fact, that even younger women with dark hair now wear black. Even blondes wear black. Even women in L.A. wear black. Most everyone wears black—except for anchorwomen, United States senators, and residents of Texas, and I feel really bad for them. I mean, black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.

  But back to hair dye. I began having my hair dyed about fifteen years ago, and for many years, I was categorized by my colorist as a single-process customer—whatever was being done to me (which I honestly have no idea how to describe) did not involve peroxide and therefore took “only” ninety minutes every six weeks or so. Whenever I complained about how long it took, I was told that I was lucky I wasn’t blond. Where hair dye is concerned, being blond is practically a career.

  Oh, the poor blondes! They were sitting there at the colorist’s when I arrived, and they were still sitting there when I left. Their scalps were sectioned off and dotted with little aluminum-foil packets; they had to sit under hair-dryers; they complained bitterly about their dry and damaged hair and their chronic split ends. I felt superior to them in every way. For the first time in my life, it seemed, there was an advantage to being a brunette.

  But then, about a year ago, my colorist gave me several highlights as a present. Highlights, you probably know, are little episodes of blondness that are scattered about your head. They involve peroxide. They extend the length of time involved in hair dying from unbearable to unendurable. As I sat in the chair, waiting for my highlights to sink in, I was bored witless. Hours passed. I couldn’t imagine why I had been conned into agreeing to this free trial. I vowed that I would never ever even be tempted to have highlights again, much less to pay money for them. (They are, in addition to being time-consuming, wildly expensive. Naturally.)

  But—you will probably not be surprised to hear this—those highlights were a little like that first sip of brandy Alexander that Lee Remick drank in Days of Wine and Roses. I emerged onto Madison Avenue with four tiny, virtually invisible blondish streaks in my hair, and was so thrilled and overwhelmed by the change in my appearance that I honestly thought that when I came home, my husband wouldn’t recognize me. As it happened, he didn’t even notice I’d done anything to myself. But it didn’t matter; from that moment on, I was hooked. As a result, my hair-dying habit now takes at least three hours every six weeks or so, and because my hair colorist is (in her world) only slightly less famous than Hillary Clinton, it costs more per year than my first automobile.

  Nails

  I want to ask a question: When and how did it happen that you absolutely had to have a manicure? I don’t begin to know the answer, but I want to leave the question out there, floating around in the atmosphere, as a reminder that just when you think you know exactly how many things you have to do to yourself where maintenance is concerned, another can just pop up out of nowhere and take a huge bite out of your life.

  I spent the first forty-five years of my life never thinking about my nails. Occasionally I filed them with the one lone wretched emery board I owned. (A side note on this subject: One of the compelling mysteries of the world, right up there with the missing socks, is what happens to all the other emery boards in the box of emery boards you bought so that you would have more than just one lone wretched emery board.) Anyway, occasionally I filed my nails, put a little polish on them, and went out into the world. This process took about three minutes, twice a year. (Just kidding. But not by much.) I knew there were women who had manicures on a regular basis, but in my opinion they were indolent women who had nothing better to do. Or they were under the mistaken impression that painted nails were glamorous. They were certainly not women who made their living at a typewriter, the machine that was the sworn enemy of long nails.

  And then one day, like mushrooms, a trillion nail places appeared in Manha
ttan. Suddenly there were more nail places than there were liquor stores, or Kinko’s, or opticians, or dry cleaners, or locksmiths, and there are way more of all of those in Manhattan than you can ever understand. Sometimes it seemed there were more nail places in Manhattan than there were nails. Most of these nail places were staffed by young Korean women, all of whom could do a manicure quickly and efficiently and not eat up the clock in any way by feigning the remotest interest in their customers. And they were incredibly cheap—eight or ten dollars at most for a regular manicure.

  Soon everyone was getting manicures. If your nails weren’t manicured (as opposed to merely clean), you felt ungroomed. You felt ashamed. You felt like sitting on your hands. And so it became necessary to have manicures once a week. Which brings me, alas, to pedicures.

  The best thing about a pedicure is that most of the year, from September to May to be exact, no one except your loved one knows if you have had one. The second best thing about a pedicure is that while you’re having your feet done, you have the use of your hands and can easily read or even talk on a cell phone. The third best thing about a pedicure is that when it’s over, your feet really do look adorable.

  The worst thing about pedicures is that they take way too much time and then, just when you think you’re done, you have to wait for your toenails to dry. It takes almost as long for your toenails to dry as it does to have a pedicure. So there you sit, for what seems like eternity, and finally you can’t stand waiting one more minute so you gently slip on your sandals and leave and on the way home you absolutely ruin the polish on your big toe and since your big toe is really the only thing anyone notices as far as your feet are concerned, you might as well not have had a pedicure in the first place.