by Nora Ephron
LILLIAN: If you want to believe that, it makes no difference to me. Because you don’t know the first thing about stories. If you did, you wouldn’t do silly things like telling us there are no nightingales in North America. Fine, Hammett was just a story. And one day he gave me a book of British court cases and said, “Here’s something.” In it was an article about a girls’ school in Scotland where two headmistresses were accused by a student of having a lesbian relationship. The scandal forced the school to close, and the headmistresses sued the student for libel. I was very lucky, because he’d given me something that had structure, it had a subject—
MARY: Its subject was lying—
LILLIAN: I called the play The Children’s Hour, and it was, for its time, shocking. It’s always nice to begin with something shocking. It’s a way of saying—[A little Mae West.] “I’m here. Notice me, boys. Come over to my corner of the playground and I’ll show you my underpants.” I was a sensation, and I was twenty-nine.
The BARTENDERS shake up a new round of drinks, and a man in a top hat enters and sits down next to MARY. He is highwaisted and slightly overweight. This is EDMUND WILSON.
MARY:
WE SPOKE, WE DRANK, WE KNEW—
BARTENDERS:
EDMUND WILSON APPEARS—
MARY:
THE SCENT OF DISASTER
THE CLINK OF A GLASS AND YOU
BARTENDERS:
HE WAS OLD HE WAS NEW
MARY:
A VOICE LIKE MY OWN SAID “I DO”
I WOKE, I SANK, I FLEW
For many years—for most of my life, really—I tried to figure out why I married Edmund Wilson. He was, of course, brilliant. Say something brilliant, Edmund.
EDMUND WILSON: Something brilliant.
MARY: And he was famous for being a great deal of fun. Say something fun, Edmund.
EDMUND WILSON: Something fun.
MARY: And he was eminent. And clever. And he was interested in all sorts of odd things. Puppets. He could take a bow tie and turn it into a tiny mouse—
He turns a bow tie into a tiny mouse.
EDMUND WILSON: Squeak squeak.
MARY: —and he had met Harry Houdini, and he could do magic tricks.
EDMUND WILSON stands and removes his top hat and pulls a rabbit out of it. He exits with the rabbit.
He was called Bunny, but not because of the rabbit. [Indicating LILLIAN.] She loved him.
LILLIAN: I did. I didn’t really know him until years later, but I absolutely adored him. Everyone did.
BARTENDERS:
EVERYONE LOVED HIM
AND NOBODY SHOVED HIM DOWN ANYONE’S THROAT
MARY:
THIS IS TRUE
BARTENDERS:
AND MAY WE NOTE THAT WE KNEW
AND ADORED HIM
LILLIAN: Everyone did. Everyone but you.
MARY: Did you ever—?
LILLIAN: Sleep with Edmund Wilson? Absolutely not. Although I did sleep with Philip Rahv. Once.
BARTENDERS:
SHE SLEPT WITH PHILIP RAHV
MARY: Not even once. [Beat.] I was sleeping with Philip Rahv when I met Edmund Wilson. I was in love with Philip Rahv.
LILLIAN: No one remembers Philip Rahv. They all think you’re talking about Philip Roth. [To the audience.] It’s Philip Rahv—[She mouths the words, “And I did sleep with him.”]
MARY: Philip Rahv was tall and handsome and about to become the editor of Partisan Review—and I was just starting to write criticism. We lived together in a one-room apartment, and we argued endlessly about everything. Whether Jews were superior to gentiles—which he believed, of course. It was as if he were on a game show—
PHILIP RAHV enters, pushing a small table.
Jewish geniuses for five hundred dollars.
PHILIP RAHV: [A slight Russian accent.] Einstein, Marx, Spinoza—
MARY: Exactly. He was very intense. We waged class struggle every day.
LILLIAN: “My First Jew” by Mary McCarthy.
BARTENDERS:
A SMOKE, A DRINK, A JEW
A WAR OF THE CLASSES
A MURKY MORASS FOR TWO
PHILIP RAHV:
I LOVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE MASSES WITH YOU
BARTENDERS:
THOSE CIRCULAR FIGHTS WE’D PURSUE
MARY walks over to the table, which is set for dinner, and starts to cut a loaf of bread.
PHILIP RAHV: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka—
MARY: I’m not playing this game with you anymore—
PHILIP RAHV: Because you always lose.
MARY: I do not always lose. How can I lose with Shakespeare on my team?
PHILIP RAHV: But Sigmund Freud is not on your team—
MARY: I’m not playing, Philip—
PHILIP RAHV: Or Jascha Heifetz, or Vladimir Horowitz—
MARY takes a particularly vicious cut at the loaf of bread.
LILLIAN:
A SMOKE
MARY:
A DRINK
PHILIP RAHV:
A JEW
A beat.
What are you doing?
MARY: I’m cutting the crusts off.
PHILIP RAHV: Do you know why you’re cutting the crusts off?
MARY: Because the sandwich tastes better with the crusts off—
PHILIP RAHV shakes his head—that’s not the right answer.
Because I grew up in a family where they cut the crusts off—
Wrong answer again.
I give up.
PHILIP RAHV: The reason people cut the crusts off bread is so they can throw the crusts away. Which shows the world that they have money, so much money they don’t even need the whole piece of bread. It’s a way for the middle-class goyim to pretend to be upper-class goyim—
MARY: [Interrupting.] It makes the sandwiches look nicer.
PHILIP RAHV: It’s very bourgeois.
MARY: Liking pretty things doesn’t make you bourgeois.
PHILIP RAHV: Caring about them does.
He stands and picks up a pretty little vase with a few flowers in it.
MARY: What are you doing?
PHILIP RAHV: Watch this—
He starts across the room toward MARY and lets the vase fly out of his hand—MARY screams.
MARY: Philip!—
He catches the vase.
PHILIP RAHV: It’s just a possession. Possessions mean nothing.
MARY: It was my grandmother’s. It’s practically all I have from my grandmother.
PHILIP RAHV: It’s a thing. It’s just a thing. Who needs it?
MARY: What would you suggest I put flowers in?
PHILIP RAHV: Where is it written we have to have flowers?
MARY: Oh, I suppose there’s a Marxist position on flowers—
PHILIP RAHV: And as for linen napkins—
He holds up a linen napkin.
MARY: They were my grandmother’s—
He picks up a silver fork.
PHILIP RAHV: And silver—
He puts the fork back as MARY says:
MARY: The silver was—
PHILIP AND MARY: [Together.] My grandmother’s.
PHILIP RAHV: You know what my grandmother left me? A scrap of paper. And you know what was on that scrap of paper? A message. And you know what that message said? “When the Cossacks come, don’t open the door.”
A beat.
MARY: I suppose Jews don’t care about things they own—
PHILIP RAHV: Oh, voila. Now it comes out—
MARY: [With a much better French accent.] It’s “voila.”
PHILIP RAHV: [Fracturing the pronunciation.] Voila yourself. [A beat.]
MARY: [Repeating his line.] Voila now what comes out?
PHILIP RAHV: Voila, scratch a goy and you find an anti-Semite.
MARY: I am not an anti-Semite. That is so ludicrous. It’s all right for you to accuse me of being overly attached to meaningless objects, but when I suggest that your people are not exactly—
&nbs
p; PHILIP RAHV: My people. Oy, oy, oy, that’s good. My people are not exactly what? Say it, go on—
MARY: Your people—some of your people—some of your people living on Park Avenue, for instance—are not exactly living on bread and water—
PHILIP RAHV: But if they were, they would eat the crusts. [He stands.] Good-bye. I’m going into the bathroom to stare at my foreskin.
MARY: You don’t have a foreskin.
PHILIP RAHV: Exactly.
PHILIP RAHV goes into the bathroom and slams the door. A beat.
MARY: We were incredibly happy. [She goes to the bureau and takes out a fox stole and wraps it around her neck. Re: the stole.] My grandmother’s. [Beat.] One day Philip had a lunch for the great critic Edmund Wilson and took me to it. I wore my best black dress and a silver fox stole. He—Edmund—was short and stout and pink and pop-eyed, and he huffed and he puffed all the way through lunch. A few weeks later he took me to dinner. Here’s what I had for dinner: three daiquiris, two double Manhattans, a bottle of red wine, and several tumblers of B&B. Two weeks later a similar dinner, and then to his house in Connecticut. I was shown to a guest bedroom. I decided to come down to the study where I knew he would be. It was late. There was a couch. He misunderstood why I had come, and took me in his arms, and I gave up the battle.
BARTENDERS:
A COUCH, A KISS, AND YOU
THE RAPTUROUS FORCE
OF A FUTURE DIVORCE
FOR TWO
BEFORE IT BEGAN
IT WAS THROUGH
LILLIAN: You slept with him because you were drunk.
MARY: That wasn’t the reason—
LILLIAN: Why are you making this into the turning point of the twentieth century?
MARY: But I didn’t come down to the study to sleep with him. And I tried to explain that to him later. Not that he cared—the only thing he cared about was that it had happened. I’d slept with him, that was the fact, case closed. But I hadn’t gone there to sleep with him. I’d gone there to talk to him, I swear, I’d gone there only to talk to him.
LILLIAN: Listen to this, you wrote this: “She married him as a punishment for the sin of having slept with him when she did not love him, when she loved … someone else.”
MARY: I also wrote, “It made no sense for me to sleep with him, so I married him so it would make sense.”
LILLIAN: Bullshit. What about ambition? What about vanity? What about how pleased you had to have been that this brilliant man had chosen you? Or did you think it was only because you were “a princess among the trolls”?
MARY: I didn’t write that about myself. I wrote it about a character in a short story.
LILLIAN: [Dismissively.] It was fiction. Hmmph.
MARY: Yes. It was.
LILLIAN: You wrote fact and called it fiction—
MARY: And you wrote fiction and called it fact.
LILLIAN: Ooh ooh ooh, that is so painful.
MARY: Was there ever a moment we could have been friends?
LILLIAN: Hard to imagine.
They both think about it for a moment.
When would it have been?
MARY: Hard to imagine. [Beat.] But isn’t it odd? The two of us might never have become real writers if it weren’t for these two older men who came into our lives at almost the same moment. After we were married, Edmund led me to a small guest bedroom on the ground floor of his house. There was a desk and a typewriter. He put me in that room and closed the door, and I became a writer. I wrote short stories, and they were published, and one of them was called “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” It was about a young woman who meets a traveling salesman on a train, and they get drunk, and she wakes up naked in his sleeping berth. It was very shocking, it was, it was shocking, and because of it, I was a sensation, and I was twenty-nine.
LILLIAN: [Mae West again.] “Hey, boys, come on over and I’ll show you my underpants.”
MARY: Literally. In the story was a pair of underpants.
LILLIAN: With a safety pin in them.
MARY: You read it?
LILLIAN: Of course I read it. Everyone read it.
MARY: Did you like it?
LILLIAN: Did I like it? After all those horrible things you said about me and my work?
MARY: I was just wondering what you thought of it.
LILLIAN: I liked it. I liked Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, too.
MARY: Thank you. I liked The Children’s Hour.
LILLIAN looks at her, surprised.
Your plays were so well made. Too well made, really—there was way too much of the gun over the mantel in the first act being fired at the end of the play—
LILLIAN: Let’s just go back to you liked it.
BARTENDERS:
THEY CLASH, THEY LINK
MARY: I did.
LILLIAN: Thank you.
BARTENDERS:
INCENSED IN SYNC
Both women start to say something, then change their minds.
A SMOKE, A DRINK
LILLIAN AND MARY:
AND YOU
MARY AND LILLIAN: [To a BARTENDER.] Bartender!
BLACKOUT.
Scene 4
Reds.
A huge red parachute silk curtain drops from the flies.
ENSEMBLE:
ARE YOU NOW
HAVE YOU EVER
STATE YOUR NAME
DO YOU SWEAR
GIVE US NAMES
WHO WAS THERE
WAS THERE ANYBODY ELSE
IT’S THE HOUSE
UN-AMERICAN
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN
DID YOU KNOW
WERE YOU THERE
I REFUSE ON THE GROUND
GIVE US NAMES
DO YOU SWEAR
ARE YOU NOW
DID YOU EVER
THE COMMITTEE IS IN ORDER
GIVE US NAMES
ARE YOU NOW
HAVE YOU EVER EVER BEEN
STATE YOUR NAME
SO HELP YOU GOD
We see LILLIAN and MARY dressed as young women.
ANNOUNCER: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the—
MARY: Me? Are you serious? I was the palest of pinkos. I marched in the May Day parade in my prettiest dress. I became a Trotskyite almost by chance—
LILLIAN: No one here even knows what a Trotskyite is anymore—
MARY: No one here knows what a Stalinist is, either. She was a Stalinist. Tell them what you believed—
LILLIAN: I never said I was a Stalinist.
MARY: You’re dead. Tell them. What can happen?
LILLIAN isn’t going to admit it.
All right, then: had you been a Stalinist, what might you have believed?
LILLIAN: The Stalinists believed that a certain amount of bad stuff was part of any revolution, and that it would eventually stop.
MARY: And the Trotskyites believed that bad stuff was bad stuff and would lead to more bad stuff.
LILLIAN: The Stalinists turned out to be wrong.
MARY: So wrong. So very very wrong.
LILLIAN: I said they were wrong.
MARY: And we turned out to be right. [Beat.] Anyway, how I became a Trotskyite. It was 1936, I was living in New York, and everyone in New York was a leftist. I would never have made a true Marxist—it’s something you have to take up early, like ballet—but then the Moscow trials began. Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian revolution, was accused of being a traitor, and thousands of people were sent to Siberia or executed for being in cahoots with him. It was a monstrous frame-up engineered by Joseph Stalin, it was completely unjust, but the truth is that when it began, I didn’t know a thing about it because I was off in Reno, getting a divorce from my first husband. When I got back—
We hear the sound of argument and see a Village party. There’s a table with bottles and paper cups and a group of men intensely talking. One of them is JAMES T. FARRELL.
JAMES T. FARRELL: You can’t mean it—
MARY: That�
�s James T. Farrell, who wrote Studs Lonigan—
JAMES T. FARRELL: You can’t possibly read what Trotsky wrote and think there’s any way he collaborated with the Germans—
All the following partygoer dialogue is meant to overlap.
PARTYGOER #1: But Holtzman testified he met with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen—
PARTYGOER #2: But the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen burned to the ground in 1912—
PARTYGOER #3: So they couldn’t possibly have met at the Hotel Bristol—
JAMES T. FARRELL: He’s being framed and he deserves a hearing. Surely he deserves a hearing. Mary thinks so, don’t you, dear?
MARY: [To the audience.] I had no idea what they were talking about. [To JAMES T. FARRELL.] Come again?
JAMES T. FARRELL: Trotsky—
MARY: Trotsky—
JAMES T. FARRELL: Deserves a hearing. Don’t you think?
MARY: Has something happened to Trotsky?
JAMES T. FARRELL: Has something happened to Trotsky? She wants to know if something has happened to Trotsky—
MARY: I’m sorry.
JAMES T. FARRELL: Trotsky’s been falsely accused of plotting with the Nazis to murder almost everyone in the Kremlin. Sixteen Bolsheviks have implicated him, and they’ve all been executed. Trotsky denies the charges. So he deserves a hearing, right?
MARY: [To the audience re: JAMES T. FARRELL.] I liked him so much. [To JAMES T. FARRELL.] Yes. A hearing. Absolutely. Everyone deserves a hearing.
JAMES T. FARRELL: Not to mention asylum, don’t you think?
MARY: [Once again this is a surprise, but she’s trying to bluff her way through as best she can.] Asylum. Great idea.
She and JAMES T. FARRELL toast. MARY walks away from the party.
A few days later I opened the mail and found a letter from a group that was demanding Trotsky’s right to a hearing and to asylum, and my name was on the letterhead. No one had even asked me. They had no right. So I decided to remove my name from the list that very minute. And I meant to. Truly I did. But I forgot. And then, after a day or two, the phone rang. It was a Stalinist I barely knew, calling to persuade me to resign from this committee I hadn’t even joined. I hung up, and the phone rang again, and again. “You must withdraw.” “There will be consequences.” “Think it over, Mary.” It made me very angry. So I never took my name off the list. And—[Shrugs.] that’s how I became a Trotskyite. I became a fanatic Trotskyite. I signed letters, I marched, I slept only with other Trotskyites—with a few exceptions—and I went to meetings where I was shouted down and accused of being the sort of person who “looked for pimples on the great smiling face of the Soviet Union.”
