by Nora Ephron
July 24
Sherman Rogin on the beach again. This time I’m positive he winked at me. And I could swear he deliberately walked his dog past me several times just to sneak extra looks at my Rudi Gernreich black bikini with plastic inserts. Ellie says he is having an affair with Rustine Pepper, the wife of the Village Voice columnist, in whose driveway his dog was seen recently tethered. What’s more, she says that the dog, a German shepherd, is definitely the prototype of the Doberman pinscher which developed such fascinating fetishistic tastes in his last novel. “JEWISH NOVELIST BREAKS UP LAWYER’S MARRIAGE. Guard Dog Keeps Angry Husband Away from East Hampton Lovenest.”
July 29
Our first rainy weekend. Frank arrived Thursday for his first three-day weekend since the Fourth, expecting to find cheerful babies and a tanned and terrific me. We sat in the house with wet sheets and mildewed air. Kids screamed all day. We stared Ingmar Bergman–like at each other all night. There was a movie playing in town but we had seen it in the city in April. There was a movie at the Bridgehampton Drive-In, but it starred Doris Day. Sunday, in desperation, we went relentlessly antiquing. Ended up at Ballasses in Amagansett and bought three thoroughly mysterious objects good only for trailing plants over. Frank left this morning, cursing me, the Long Island Rail Road, and his brand-new bathing suit, and blaming all of us for the weather. It makes sense. He’s a rational man. He knows there’s no use blaming God.
August 4
A party at Hank Henry’s. I met his wife—on the Coast Guard beach, where else?—and she invited us. Unbelievable house—eight thousand dollars for the summer, one second from the beach, and four in help, including a waiter who served drinks with a toothpick in his mouth. Everyone who was anyone was there, my dear. Fags. Lesbians, Lyricists. Composers. Actresses. Playwrights. Authors. What we were doing on the list I don’t know—I think we were being used in about the same way a florist uses green leaves to fill out a vase of roses. I was so nervous about going that I spent a fortune on a long chiffon culotte outfit that was absolutely transparent and made me look as if I had nothing on underneath. Frank thought it was obscene, but Sherman Rogin loved it. I told him how much I admired his work. He told me how much he admired my ensemble. A wonderful evening. Though, now that I think of it, there wasn’t really much reason to have been worried about it: the conversation dwelled mainly on the price of real estate in the area. Today is the mother’s helper’s day off. I’m taking the kids to the game preserve. Afterward, I think we’ll go to the bakery in Southampton—which just happens to be next door to the bookstore where I can buy the collected works of S. Rogin.
August 6
A night with the ladies. Incredible. For one thing, lots of drinking. I felt so old—I always associated drinking-with-the-girls with the ladies tippling martinis at Schrafft’s. For another thing, the conversation: they talked of nothing but which beach wives were being unfaithful, with whom, and how. It seems that the Czech film maker has turned out to be an advertising illustrator and has taken up with a blonde surgeon’s wife from Passaic who is out for the summer while her unsuspecting husband does open-heart surgery all week at Downstate Medical. Meanwhile, the word from Bridgehampton is that a television newscaster and his wife have switched mates with a couple of anthropologists across the street and are living happily ever after. Everyone searched her mind for more stories of infidelity that led to happy endings. No one could think of any. All that I could think of were the tales of indiscretion I used to hear during my summers in the city—like the one about the Random House editor seen necking on the grass in Central Park with a copy reader—but no one seemed to want to hear tales about what might be going on in town. I suppose no one wants to think about it. I know I don’t. The ladies insist there is as much hanky-panky out here as there is in the city. Ellie says it isn’t so. Not that she would have any idea: the high point of her summer was the night a peacock escaped from a private game collection and spent the night honking and defecating on her patio. I was so depressed by the evening and all the girl talk that I called Frank when I got home. He was out. “LAWYER ARRESTED IN EAST SIDE ORGY: Claims He Was Driven to It After Five Weeks as Summer Bachelor.” All the ladies agree that if their husbands were unfaithful to them, they would know. I wonder.
August 11
It rained again all weekend. Frank has taken to muttering something about how he is paying $100-a-minute for a vacation in the rain. Adam and Amanda both have summer colds, with little red noses on their little red faces. Worms have struck the tomatoes and a rabbit ate the dill. I am fighting back with chicken wire and insecticide.
August 12
This is not my week. Today the doorbell rang, and standing there was a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old girl. “I hear there’s somebody young living here,” she said. I went to get the mother’s helper. And all my illusions about how I still manage to look seventeen vanished.
August 18
Sherman Rogin called this morning and asked if I’d like to have dinner with him. Tonight. I know I shouldn’t have accepted, but I couldn’t help it. Frank has been postponing the two weeks he was supposed to spend out here—to the point that I’ll be lucky if he gets out for a four-day Labor Day weekend. And in the meantime, it’s hard not to feel that my weekdays are spent in a world of ladies and little people. It’s the Indian reservation, with all the men off making war and wampum and all the ladies sitting home drying ears of corn. Of course, after Sherman called, I felt so dreadful about accepting I decided to call him back and tell him I couldn’t possibly go through with it. I couldn’t reach him. I thought of Frank, calling me every night, not going to see the new Steve McQueen movie because he knew I would want to see it when I got back to town, making last weekend so nice by deigning to play tennis with me and taking me to Gordon’s for crispy duck and chocolate cake. I called him in town, all weepy and ready to make some muddled confession. When I got through to him, he was so annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of a meeting that I determined to go through with the date after all. “LAWYER’S WIFE ARRESTED FOR BITING AUTHOR ON HEAD: ‘I Couldn’t Help It,’ She Said Later. It Looked Like Black Grapes.’ ” Actually, I doubt that anything will happen. We’re just having dinner. You can have dinner with a man if you’re married and have it not mean anything at all. He’s probably just blocked on his new novel and wants to talk to a sympathetic soul. And if, in the course of the evening, he happens to attack and rape me—well, we’re civilized people. I could hardly yell for the police. I’d just have to submit.
August 19
Well. He picked me up at 7:30. I had spent two hours figuring out what to wear. I couldn’t very well appear in my diaphanous culottes. So I wore a little white skirt and a little red shirt and I looked just like the Peck & Peck girl I am. We drove to Montauk, to a fish place overlooking the water. And there I was, sitting with a glamorous, sensual, potentially violent novelist, who spent most of the evening talking about his mother and whether he should trade in his car for a Fiat and where you can buy the best clams in the area. Then we went for a drink at a bar in East Hampton and talked some more. About my mother’s helper and her prospects for higher education. About Adam’s day camp. About the prices at the Farmer’s Market in Amagansett. And nothing happened. That’s right. I didn’t know whether to be elated or disappointed. I think he expected me to be whatever he thought a lady in a transparent dress would be, and I thought he would be some kind of romantic madcap. I don’t know. In any case, he dropped me off at 11:30 and chucked me under the chin. Like I was his kid sister. There I was, home before midnight, feeling completely foolish and horribly guilty. As well I might have. Under the right circumstances—whatever the right circumstances might have been—I might have let that man have his way with me. I might have become pregnant by him. And produced a child that was clearly not my husband’s. “PATERNITY SUIT INTRODUCES GENETIC LAW: Blue-Eyed Lawyer Accuses Blue-Eyed Wife of Going Elsewhere for Brown-Eyed Child.” Frank is coming out today on the 5:34, an
d I’m probably overdoing things, but I’m planning to bring martinis to the train. If he smoked a pipe or wore slippers, I’d bring them too. And I’ve promised myself to ask him all about his cases. And cook lobsters, even though I hate dropping the poor things into boiling water. Monday I begin Jane Austen.
September 9
We’re back in New York. I almost cried as we drove across the Triborough Bridge. I’m so happy to be back. If I never have to clean another grain of sand out of a car, or remove tar from my kids’ feet with turpentine, or set foot in the town of East Hampton again, I’ll be absolutely overjoyed. Last week I told Frank I’d like to go to Europe next summer. He nodded. “What are we going to do with the kids?” he said. “Leave them with your mother,” I said. He said he would think about it. And then, before my eyes, he picked up the real-estate section and began scanning Houses for Sale—Long Island. Hmmmmm. “LAWYER’S WIFE BECOMES L.I. HOSTESS WITH MOSTEST: East Hampton Home Becomes Salon for Summering Artists and Writers.” Hmmmmm. Well, I suppose there are worse fates.
An Interview With Mike Nichols
The most dangerous thing for a journalist writing a profile is to worry more about what the person he is writing about will think of his article than what the people he is writing for will think. That happens to be the position in which I found myself when writing about Mike Nichols, and it made me vow never again to write anything about him, or about anyone I particularly care for. Everyone I know who has interviewed Nichols has had this experience: he is smart and kind and funny and he listens and he ultimately makes me sound like a blathering fool when describing him. So I will stop.
December 1968
Q: First of all, I understand you’ve been in New York for three straight weeks, and I wondered how it happened that you were in one place for that long a time.
NICHOLS: Well, I didn’t go anywhere. We start shooting Catch-22 next month, and the producer and Buck Henry (the screenwriter) and some of the people on the picture came here, because I didn’t want to go to California, and they indulged me.
Q: When I interviewed you about Buck Henry, you told me someone once asked you about California and you said you had found peace in Hollywood.
NICHOLS: That was a joke. Buck asked me that—that’s how we met. He said, “Do you like it here?” And I said, “Yes. Here under the shadow of this great big tree, I have found peace.” It was at a party at Jane Fonda’s house and was, in fact, in the shadow of a great tree.
Q: Do you find Hollywood not conducive to working?
NICHOLS: Living, I would say.
Q: Most people say it’s easier to live there.
NICHOLS: Well, yes it is. But who says that’s good?
Q: I wanted to ask about Catch-22, because I just saw Joseph Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven, which has more or less the same theme, and it seemed a little old-fashioned and World War Twoish. I wondered if you thought Catch-22 was still timely?
NICHOLS: I don’t think of it as, one, being about World War Two and two—perhaps I’d better change that to (a) being about World War Two and (b) timely or not timely. I think of it as a picture about dying and a picture about when you get off. It’s a picture about choosing at what point you take control over your life and say, “No, I won’t. I decide. I draw the line.” And also, “timely” is, I think, a dangerous word. You know, is Grand Illusion timely? It’s just a great picture.
Q: You once said you were laid out for years. What are your plans after you finish Catch-22?
NICHOLS: I have an obligation to do two more pictures, but they can be whenever and whatever I want. I think I have found a play I want to do with Elaine May after Catch-22. There were three of us in Chicago—Elaine, Paul Sills, and me—and we started a theater together and then started the group called Compass that became Second City and we’re now talking about starting a theater again together in New York, to close the circle and get back to what we did. In that course of planning what we wanted to do, we found a French play that seems to me about what Elaine’s and my work has been about, and it seemed necessary for us to play it.
Q: Are you going to act in it?
NICHOLS: Yes. I hope. It’s very dangerous to talk about something that far away because Catch-22 will probably take most of my life.
Q: Did you ever expect The Graduate to become what it has?
NICHOLS: No, of course not. It never crossed any of our minds.
Q: Was there a point when you began to think that it might happen? Was there one night?
NICHOLS: There was a night that we previewed it in New York, at the RKO 86th or the Loew’s 81st or the Loew’s 86th—anyway, a huge theater on the East Side that holds like twenty-six hundred or three thousand people. We were showing our work print, with all the splices in it. And I had a box in my lap, running the sound, because we hadn’t dubbed it yet. The theater was packed, and I spent—naturally, as I always do—I spent all my time saying to everybody around me, “Is it too dark? Is it too light? Is it too loud? Should I make it louder? Can you hear it? It’s too loud now, isn’t it?” and after a while, I stopped, because what the audience was doing was really rather shocking. It sort of sounded like a prize fight. I have never heard an audience make that noise before. Laugh like that. Shout like that. Yell like that. And for the last five minutes of the picture they began to cheer and they didn’t stop. And I was very taken aback, and in my own bizarre way, pleased. And then I ran the hell out of the theater.
Q: What did you do then?
NICHOLS: I went home and got mad at myself that I hadn’t stayed.
Q: When I saw The Graduate, I felt that it was totally about my life. It was such a California movie, and my adolescence there came rushing back at me.
NICHOLS: Well, have you ever had the experience of seeing something the details of which really had nothing to do with your life and yet you sit there and can say, “That’s my life”? I’m not saying that that’s a quality that The Graduate had, because how do I know? But it happens with films and it happens with people. I mean, I can see L’Avventura or 8 1/2 and say, “That’s my life.” It has nothing to do with the details of my life.
Q: And one film has nothing to do with the other.
NICHOLS: That’s right. In fact, they’re almost opposite extremes. But that experience is possible. Somebody gets his own life on the nose, he really gets it the way it was for him, and we can sit there and say, “Yes, I remember that.”
Q: Once, when speaking about The Graduate, you said that when you were making it you didn’t think you were making a film about a generation but about a young man of a certain age. “We were that age once,” you said. “People forget that.” I thought that was interesting because it seemed to indicate you didn’t think too much of this thing called the generation gap.
NICHOLS: Well, it seems to me a mistake to generalize people. They’ve been generalized so much—“the middle class,” “the kids”—that a very odd thing has happened: they actually think of themselves as instances of a generality. Which I don’t think is a possible way to live. I think that there are gaps between people. But I find often as large a gap between me and somebody my own age as I do between myself and somebody nineteen, or fifteen, or, in the case of my daughter, five. But as soon as you generalize it, I think you lose particulars. Yes, sure, something is happening. But it’s been generalized so much and made into slogans so much that to undo the kind of magazine-propaganda aspect of phrases like “generation gap,” it’s best to get specific and talk about things between individuals.
Q: I’d like to see The Graduate again.
NICHOLS: Me, too. I haven’t seen it since it opened.
Q: You should—although every time I see a movie six months after it’s opened, the film is cracking and the sound is bleeping.
NICHOLS: That’s why I don’t go. Because it’s so painful. Opening night of Virginia Woolf—that is, the first press night—Mr. Warner in his wisdom decided the whole world press was to see it all together on one night. A
nd they all did, in fact, see it together on one night. And when they changed from the first reel to the second reel, the screen went black—not gray, not very dark, but black. And I went, in my calm way, and screamed at the manager. And he put his arms around my shoulders and said, “Mike, baby, don’t worry. We’ve got the best projectionist in the business up there.” And I had to comfort myself with the fact that he was the best projectionist in the business, although the screen was totally black. I can’t go to see my pictures in a theater because they’re always too light or too dark or you can’t hear them. I make such a pest of myself that the people in the theaters dread seeing me come. So I just stay away.
Q: Have you done that? Arrived at the projection booth and said, “Listen …”?
NICHOLS: I used to do that with Virginia Woolf. And they began to think of me as some kind of crank, you know, that they had to suffer, that had these illusions that the audience should hear the dialogue and possibly even see the film. I finally decided that I was driving myself and them crazy, and I stayed away. It doesn’t seem to bother most people. I once went to see Torn Curtain and you couldn’t hear it and you couldn’t see it. But the audience didn’t seem to mind. They sat there very happily, laughing occasionally—I don’t know at what, because you couldn’t hear the dialogue. The cutter on The Graduate, Sam O’Steen, went to see it at a theater in Los Angeles, and it wasn’t out of focus—it looked like a psychedelic light show. There were vague, vague human shapes playing across the screen. And he went running to the projection booth—in which the projectionist was screwing on the floor with an usherette. So at that point you have to say to yourself, Life is more important than art.
