Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  The first reference to her mental health came up on Wednesday—and she chose to take it lightly. Pat Loud was on the show, and she remarked that since moving to New York she had seen more crazy people than she ever had in her life.

  “Don’t you think that’s because American people have too much leisure?” asked Martha.

  “No,” said Pat Loud. “I don’t think so.”

  Povich turned to Mrs. Mitchell. “I don’t know whether I should, but I will bring this subject up,” he said. “There were nasty rumors about you, Martha, when you left Washington, in this circumstance, and I was wondering how you lived with that.”

  “Well,” said Martha, “don’t you see, I’m still crazy. It doesn’t take very long to find that out. But, you know, I’m happy. They say that crazy people are happier than anyone else. Look at me.”

  On Thursday, Helen Thomas and Time magazine’s Bonnie Angelo came on as guests—and Martha, surrounded by the closest thing she has to friends these days, relaxed. Povich fumbled in with a question—this time to Miss Thomas—about Martha’s sanity, and Martha listened as Miss Thomas defended her. “Martha Mitchell hit this town like a bombshell,” she recalled, and as she talked, Martha Mitchell seemed to become sadder—which was understandable, since Helen Thomas sounded a little as if she were talking about a dead person. Povich asked how the telephone connection between the two of them began. “You know, it always amazes me,” said Martha. “Why am I associated with a telephone when we’ve had two Presidents of late who’ve done nothing but telephone all night long? I mean, why should they pick on a poor woman? Look at Johnson. Look at Richard Nixon. I have more funny stories to tell about Richard Nixon telephoning the apartment at two or three in the morning, and I’m going to tell them sometime.”

  “How about right now?” said Bonnie Angelo.

  “No,” said Martha. “I’m saving it for my book.”

  Miss Angelo asked how Martha felt about the press.

  “I want to say, from the bottom of my heart, that I think that I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t for the press,” she said. “They have literally saved me from an asylum, and from I don’t know what. And I can take it one step further. If I hadn’t made that telephone call to Helen in California, the people that were behind all this, that were holding me a prisoner, would not have taken into consideration that the press knew that if anything happened to Martha Mitchell, Helen would have been there looking for me. It literally saved my life.”

  Bonnie Angelo pointed out that the White House planted the rumors about Martha’s crack-up and told reporters she was the reason Mitchell resigned.

  “Poor John,” said Martha. “Poor John had to take care of me.” She smiled ruefully and shook her head. “One of the funniest things is, and I say that not meaning funny, but in recent months people in the White House have called my friends and said, ‘Why do you listen to Martha Mitchell? She’s crazy as a loon. Don’t print anything about her.’ ”

  “I want to ask Martha,” said Miss Angelo. “Did you enjoy living in the spotlight? Are you happy you had those years as a public figure?”

  “I don’t think I’ve had time to get around to that, Bonnie,” said Martha Mitchell. “There’ve been too many hurts to really analyze the situation.”

  Friday, after her last show, I sat down with Martha Mitchell in the Panorama offices at WTTG. A staff member came in to tell her that they had gotten hundreds of phone calls praising her performance. “Isn’t that great?” she said. “With all the hell I’ve been through, to hear a little praise. I’ve gone through all this by myself, as you know. This has been an extremely trying period for me, from the standpoint of Martha. I’ve been fighting a one-man battle, and I haven’t just been fighting City Hall—I’ve been fighting the federal government. You must realize that everything that’s happened to me has been caused by the cover-up of Watergate. I was hidden, literally, for a long period of time, hidden by them, and also hidden by myself, because I had been so tremendously crushed. When you believe as I believed, and worked as hard as I worked—and nobody in Washington worked as hard as Martha Mitchell—and then all of a sudden to have your world crushed in front of you, which happened to me in California. Why did people call her crazy? Why did people call her an alcoholic? Because they were trying to shut Martha Mitchell up, and they didn’t know how to do it.

  “I lived for my family. We were the tightest-knit little family you’ve ever seen. They used to say we had a perfect marriage, a perfect love affair. We did. Every day he used to tell me I was the most wonderful woman in the world. And John always had so much confidence in me. I don’t feel I’m a deserted woman. This is not a normal marital breakup. It’s much more intricate. Because a man doesn’t change in twenty-four hours from thinking his wife is the most wonderful person in the world.”

  And so Martha Mitchell went off to her hotel. She was spending the weekend in Washington and planned to attend the Counter-Gridiron party. “The busy person is the happy person,” she said as she left. Oh, sure. And maybe the crazy person is the happy person, too. But Martha Mitchell is neither busy nor crazy nor happy. There is not much call for yesterday’s celebrities. There is probably a lesson in this, something about crazy ladies, or crying wolf, or maybe something about Richard Nixon—but I don’t know what it is. To some extent Martha Mitchell got what she deserved. But still …

  April, 1974

  Conundrum

  As I suppose everyone knows by now, James Morris was four years old and sitting under the piano listening to his mother play Sibelius when he was seized with the irreversible conviction that he ought to have been born a girl. By the age of nine, he was praying nightly for the miracle. “Let me be a girl. Amen.” He went on to the army, became a journalist, climbed Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, won awards for his books, and had four children with a wife who knew that all he really wanted was a sex change. Almost two years ago, he went off to a clinic in Casablanca that had dirty floors, shaved off his pubic hair, “and went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye and a wink of luck.” The wink of luck did that other self no good at all: the next morning, it was lopped off, and James Morris woke up to find himself as much a woman as hormones and surgery could make him. He promptly sold his dinner jacket and changed his name.

  This entire mess could doubtless have been avoided had James Morris been born an Orthodox Jew (in which case he could have adopted the standard Jewish prayer thanking God for not making him a woman) or had he gone to see a good Freudian analyst, who might have realized that any young boy sitting under a piano was probably looking up his mother’s skirt. But no such luck. James Morris has become Jan Morris, an Englishwoman who wears sweater sets and pearls, blushes frequently, bursts into tears at the littlest things, and loves having a gossip with someone named Mrs. Weatherby. Mrs. Weatherby, Morris writes, “really is concerned … about my migraine yesterday; and when I examine myself I find that I am no less genuinely distressed to hear that Amanda missed the school outing because of her ankle.”

  Conundrum is Jan Morris’s book about her experience, and I read it with a great deal of interest, largely because I always wanted to be a girl, too. I, too, felt that I was born into the wrong body, a body that refused, in spite of every imprecation and exercise I could manage, to become anything but the boyish, lean thing it was. I, too, grew up wishing for protectors, strangers to carry my bags, truck drivers to whistle out windows. I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be—feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft-spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half-bad at being a woman. In contrast, Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old Cosmopolitan girl.
To wit:

  “So I well understand what Kipling had in mind, about sisters under the skin. Over coffee a lady from Montreal effuses about Bath—‘I don’t know if you’ve done any traveling yourself’ (not too much, I demurely lie) ‘but I do feel it’s important, don’t you, to see how other people really live.’ I bump into Jane W—— in the street, and she tells me about Archie’s latest excess—‘Honestly, Jan, you don’t know how lucky you are.’ I buy some typing paper—‘How lovely to be able to write, you make me feel a proper dunce’—and walking home again to start work on a new chapter, find that workmen are in the flat, taking down a picture-rail. One of them has knocked my little red horse off the mantelpiece, chipping its enameled rump. I restrain my annoyance, summon a fairly frosty smile, and make them all cups of tea, but I am thinking to myself, as they sheepishly help themselves to sugar, a harsh feminist thought. It would be a man, I think. Well it would, wouldn’t it?”

  It is a truism of the women’s movement that the exaggerated concepts of femininity and masculinity have done their fair share to make a great many people unhappy, but nowhere is this more evident than in Jan Morris’s mawkish and embarrassing book. I first read of Morris in a Sunday New York Times Magazine article that brought dignity and real sensitivity to Morris’s obsession. But Morris’s own sensibility is so giddy and relentlessly cheerful that her book has almost no dignity at all. What she has done in it is to retrace his/her life (I am going to go crazy from the pronouns and adjectives here) by applying sentimental gender judgments to everything. Oxford is wonderful because it is feminine. Venice is sublime because it is feminine. Statesmen are dreadful because they are masculine. “Even more than now,” Morris writes of his years as a foreign correspondent, “the world of affairs was dominated by men. It was like stepping from cheap theater into reality, to pass from the ludicrous goings-on of minister’s office or ambassador’s study into the private house behind, where women were to be found doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures, or writing home.”

  And as for sex—but let Morris tell you about men and women and sex. “You are doubtless wondering, especially if you are male, what about sex?… One of the genuine and recurrent surprises of my life concerns the importance to men of physical sex.… For me the actual performance of the sexual act seemed of secondary importance and interest. I suspect this is true for most women.… In the ordinary course of events [the sex act] struck me as slightly distasteful, and I could imagine it only as part of some grand act, a declaration of absolute interdependence, or even a sacrifice.”

  Over the years, Morris saw a number of doctors, several of whom suggested he try homosexuality. (He had tried it several times before, but found it aesthetically unpleasant.) A meeting was arranged with the owner of a London art gallery. “We had a difficult lunch together,” Morris writes, “and he made eyes at the wine waiter over the fruit salad.” The remark is interesting, not just because of its hostility toward homosexuals but also because Jan Morris now makes exactly those same sorts of eyes at wine waiters—on page 150 of her book, in fact.

  As James turns into a hermaphrodite and then into Jan, the prose in the book, which is cloying enough to begin with, turns into a kind of overembellished, simile-laden verbiage that makes the style of Victorian women novelists seem spare. Exclamation points and italicized words appear with increasing frequency. Everything blushes. James Morris blushes. His “small breasts blossomed like blushes.” He starts talking to the flowers and wishing them a Happy Easter. He becomes even more devoted to animals. He is able for the first time (“the scales dropped from my eyes”) to look out a plane window and see things on the ground below not as cars and homes seen at a distance but “Lo!… as dolls’ houses and dinky toys.” Shortly before the operation, he and his wife, Elizabeth, whose understanding defies understanding, take a trip, both as women, through Oregon. “How merrily we traveled!” Morris writes. “What fun the Oregonians gave us! How cheerfully we swapped badinage with boatmen and lumberjacks, flirtatious garage hands and hospitable trappers! I never felt so liberated, or more myself, nor was I ever more fond of Elizabeth. ‘Come on in, girls,’ the motel men would say, and childish though I expect it sounds to you, silly in itself, perhaps a little pathetic, possibly grotesque, still if they had touched me with an accolade of nobility, or clad me ceremonially in crimson, I could not have been more flattered.” The only thing Morris neglects to write into this passage is a little face with a smile on it.

  Morris is infuriatingly vague about the reactions of her children (she blandly insists they adjusted perfectly) and of Elizabeth (she says they are still the closest of friends). “I am not the first,” Morris writes, “to discover that one recipe for an idyllic marriage is a blend of affection, physical potency and sexual incongruity.” (Idyllic marriage? Where your husband becomes a lady? I suppose we owe this to creeping Harold-and-Vitaism; still, it is one of the more ridiculous trends of recent years to confuse great friendships with great marriages; great marriages are when you have it all.) As for her new sex life, Jan Morris lyrically trills that her sexuality is now unbounded. But how?

  Unfortunately, she is a good deal more explicit about the details of what she refers to as “truly the symptoms of womanhood.” “The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became,” she writes. “I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly, incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.… I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them.… I did not particularly want to be good at reversing cars, and did not in the least mind being patronized by illiterate garage-men, if it meant they were going to give me some extra trading stamps.… And when the news agent seems to look at me with approval, or the man in the milk-cart smiles, I feel absurdly elated, as though I have been given a good review in the Sunday Times. I know it is nonsense, but I cannot help it.”

  The truth, of course, is that Jan Morris does not know it is nonsense. She thinks that is what it is about. And I wonder about all this, wonder how anyone in this day and age can think that this is what being a woman is about. And as I wonder, I find myself thinking a harsh feminist thought. It would be a man, I think. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

  June, 1974

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank Susan Edmiston, Rosalind Krauss, Mary Ann Madden, and Jennifer Rogers for the number of times they stayed on the telephone trying to help me figure out what on earth I was getting at; Martha Duffy for suggesting Josie’s title; Betty Suyker for her efforts in the opposite direction; the editors of Esquire and New York magazines for their encouragement and suggestions; my agent Lynn Nesbit; and, most of all, Lee Eisenberg at Esquire for being the best magazine editor I have ever worked with.

  I would also like to have thanked Josie Davis.

  Scribble Scribble

  Scribble Scribble

  Master - Table of Contents

  Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post

  People Magazine

  The Palm Beach Social Pictorial

  Brendan Gill and The New Yorker

  Bob Haldeman and CBS

  The Making of Theodore H. White

  Richard Collin and the Spaghetti Recipe

  How to Write a Newsmagazine Cover Story

  The Boston Photographs

  Barney Collier’s Book

  The Assassination Reporters

  The New Porn

  Russell Baker

  My Cousin Arthur Is Your Uncle Art

  Daniel Schorr

  Upstairs, Downstairs

  Porter Goes to the Convention

  Gentlemen’s Agreement

  Gourmet Magazine

  The Detroit News

  The Ontario Bulletin

  The Revitalization of Clay Filter: Yet Another Passage


  Double-Crostics

  The Sperling Breakfast

  Enough

  Acknowledgments

  Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post

  I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. What I’m going to do here is write something about Dorothy Schiff, and the reason I feel bad about it is that a few months ago, I managed to patch things up with her and now I’m going to blow it. She had been irritated with me for several years because I told the story about her and Otto Preminger’s sauna on the radio, but we managed to get through a pleasant dinner recently, which made me happy—not because I care whether or not Dorothy Schiff is irritated with me but simply because I have a book coming out this summer, and if she were speaking to me, I might have a shot at some publicity in the New York Post. Ah, well. It’s not easy being a media columnist. The publicity I had in mind, actually, was this little feature the Post runs on Saturdays called “At Home With,” where semi-famous people tell their favorite recipes. Mine is beef borscht.

  Dorothy Schiff is the publisher, editor and owner of the New York Post, America’s largest-selling afternoon newspaper. I used to work there. The Post is a tabloid that has a smaller news hole than the New York Daily News—five front pages, various parts of which are often rented out to Chock full o’ Nuts and Lüchow’s. It also has a center magazine section containing mostly Washington Post columnists, a first-rate sports section and drama critic, and Rose Franzblau, Earl Wilson and Dear Abby. It takes about eleven minutes to read the Post, and there are more than half a million New Yorkers like me who spend twenty cents six days a week to kill eleven minutes reading it. It is probably safe to say that fewer and fewer young people read the Post, and that fewer and fewer young people understand why anyone does. It is a terrible newspaper.