Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  Q: How did anyone at the Times know you would write a funny column?

  BAKER: Nobody knew what the column was going to be. I didn’t, the Times didn’t. I was in the Times Washington bureau, and I had a reputation for being a “writer” in quotation marks—the quotation marks implied that there were reporters and then there were writers. I did a lot of feature-type stuff. There was no expectation that the column was supposed to be funny. I’d outlined what was essentially an idea for a casual essay column, the sort of thing The New Yorker had done in the late forties in “The Talk of the Town.” The style would be casual, monosyllabic, simple sentences, small ideas. I did know at the outset that I was interested in the ironies of the public condition. I was fascinated by irony. But what you project on a piece of paper and what finally emerges are two wildly different things. When I sat down to write, what came out was what was in me. The first column ever printed was a spoof, a send-up of a Jack Kennedy press conference. Very quickly I began doing basic satires, traditional forms like dialogues, fantasies, hoaxes, parodies, burlesques.

  Q: Was it difficult?

  BAKER: At the start, yes. I didn’t know what it was going to be. Now it has a rigid identity, and there are days when it writes itself. When you start a column, you’re in a very creative state; you’re building a personality in a piece of writing. It’s a strange kind of business. After a while the column becomes a tyrant. You’ve created a personality that is one aspect of yourself, and it insists on your being true to it every time you sit down to write. As time passes and you change, you may become bored with that old personality. The problem then is how you escape the tyranny of it. In a way, it’s always a struggle between you and this tyrant you’ve created that is a piece of yourself. In the last year I’ve gone back to the essay form and abandoned the satirical form.

  Q: Is that because of moving to New York?

  BAKER: I’m not so aware of that. The change is the subject matter. It’s so easy to do Washington. You have nothing but subject matter. But what happens in New York? Who, after all, knows who Abe Beame is, or Hugh Carey? I’ve had to work a lot harder, to take special subject matter and make it mean something to people outside New York.

  Q: Someone once said something to the effect that he’d never known a writer who had a happy childhood.

  BAKER: I’ve had an unhappy life, thank God. I suspect all childhoods are unhappy. My father died when I was five—it’s my first memory—and I was lugged off from Virginia to New Jersey to live with a brother of my mother. He was the only member of the family who was employed, and he was making thirty-five dollars a week. He was married to a lovely Irishwoman who ran the household. My mother had a job where she sewed smocks for twelve dollars a week, and I was raised in a matriarchy. I was imbued with the business that you’ve got to get ahead. I always had a job, an awful job, usually selling Saturday Evening Posts. I was just terrible at it. They’d open the door and I’d say, “Well, I guess you don’t want to buy a Saturday Evening Post,” and they’d slam the door in my face.

  Q: How did you get into journalism?

  BAKER: I’d always been a drifter. When I was at Johns Hopkins, I was the only guy on the campus who didn’t know what he wanted to be. Everyone wanted to be a doctor or a scientist or an engineer. It was very depressing. In a vague way I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway—that was in the days when he was still read. There was a guy on the faculty who lectured on T. S. Eliot and also wrote for the Sun, and he told me about this job. I went to see the managing editor, and he offered me a job, and I thought, It’s a good way to kill time until I get around to writing a novel someone can publish. It was 1947 and I did police reporting at night. I never went to the office, never wrote anything. I drifted from police station to police station, hung around hospitals listening to people die, and phoned in police-blotter stuff. I did that for two years. I was in love at the time; I was leading this strange upside-down existence, hanging out with raffish characters all night and sleeping till one or two in the afternoon. I kind of liked it. I was getting an education. But after a year, I decided to go ahead and write a novel. I spent a summer and wrote a ninety-thousand-word novel in three months. You know Capote’s famous comment on Kerouac—“That’s not writing, it’s typing.” That’s what the novel was. I was a self-taught typist, and I was combining the typing exercises with the writing of a novel. It was very valuable to me later. I’m a very fast typist.

  Q: And what happened to the novel?

  BAKER: Shipped it around a few places and then I put it in the attic. It was about what it was like to be twenty-three years old. I discovered then that the world I was living in was so much more interesting than the world I was capable of conceiving. I was hooked on journalism. That was the end of it. I never went back to writing fiction.

  Q: How did you get to the Times?

  BAKER: The Sun sent me to London as its correspondent. I was twenty-seven, very young to be in London, but very adventurous. Things were very difficult in England then, and most of the American reporters went to the PX for food. I didn’t. I lived like an Englishman off the English economy, and I lost a lot of weight. I was hungry all the time. I cut myself off from the American community. Most of the reporters hung around the foreign office to get the diplomatic poop. I felt the AP would provide that. I went to Parliament and wrote about the nature of British political debate. I wrote about what Sunday afternoon was like, and British eccentrics. I was really a kind of travel writer. Everybody was writing about the British economy and taxes except me. So I began to attract some attention. Scotty Reston was head of the Times Washington bureau, and he wrote and asked me to come work there. I said no. I was happy—the Sun was about to bring me back to be White House correspondent, and that was my idea of paradise. I mean, what more was there? I came back, and after two weeks I realized I had made the worst decision of my life. I’d given up London for this pocket of tedium. I was sitting in this awful lobby waiting for Jim Hagerty to come out with a handout. At one point I was vacationing in Denver—when you covered Eisenhower you were always vacationing in Denver, writing stories on how many fish he had caught that day, or what he’d said at the first tee. Reston came through and offered me the job again. So I came to the Times on the condition I get off the White House. I went up to the Hill for a while, and the following year I was back at the White House. I got to Denver in time to cover Eisenhower’s first heart attack. I handled the first Presidential bowel movement in the history of the New York Times.

  Q: I read somewhere that you eventually became unhappy in the Washington bureau.

  BAKER: I didn’t have a period of unhappiness where I was unhappy with the Times. I was just at the end of my rope. It wasn’t possible to deal with Washington in a very sophisticated way, and the Times was not a paper where you could be very creative or innovative. For a long time I was more than willing to trade all that for the education. It was the best graduate school of political science in the world. If you wanted to know what was going on in the Senate, you went up there and Everett Dirksen explained it to you. But I’d spent over seven years doing it. I knew the personalities. I knew what speeches they were going to make on any issue. I became restless. It was really a matter of discontent with myself—I knew the limitations of the Times. Then the editor of the Sun offered me a column, a blank check, really, any kind of column I wanted. I thought, Yeah, that’s what I want to do. It was a great out for me. There was an intimation it would lead to a bigger job at the Sun. We shook hands on it. I told Reston I was leaving and he was appalled. I was shocked that anybody cared. I went home and that night Orvil Dryfoos, the publisher, called and said, We’re not going to let you leave the Times, and then they began making offers to me, and that’s how the column began.

  Q: And why did you decide to move to New York?

  BAKER: Basically it was because a pipe burst in my home in Washington on a Saturday morning. I was very depressed. I suddenly realized I was going to have to put a lot more money int
o this house, and I said, “Let’s sell the son of a bitch and get out of here.”

  April, 1976

  My Cousin Arthur Is Your Uncle Art

  The other day, my sister Delia went up to the Bronx to buy a carpet from my cousin Arthur. I had last seen my cousin Arthur in 1963, when I went up to the Bronx to buy a carpet from my uncle Charlie, who is Cousin Arthur’s father. Uncle Charlie and Cousin Arthur used to be in the carpet business together, but Cousin Arthur left the family business some years ago to go off on his own, largely because he did not get along with Cousin Norman, who was also in the family business and whom no one in the family gets along with except for Uncle Charlie, who gets along with everyone. Anyway, when my sister Delia came back from the Bronx, having bought a very nice carpet at a very good price, she called up.

  “Guess who Cousin Arthur is?” she said.

  “I give up,” I said.

  “Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art,” she said.

  Actually, as I later found out, Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art only some of the time; the rest of the time a person named Jeremiah Morris is Uncle Art, and that is part of the problem. Still, Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art more than Jeremiah Morris is Uncle Art, and if you don’t know who Uncle Art is, that’s either because you haven’t had to buy a discount carpet in New York lately, or because you’re not in the carpet business. Uncle Art is to the carpet business what Frank Perdue is to the chicken business: in short, he has his own commercial.

  “My name is Art Ephron,” read the first of Cousin Arthur’s Uncle Art advertisements, which ran, along with a large picture of Cousin Arthur himself, in the New York Daily News in 1972, “and I’ve been in the carpet business for, oh, longer than I care to remember. And every few weeks it seemed one of my relatives would say, ‘Uncle Art, I was wondering, well, uh, maybe you could get us a break on some carpet. You know, something nice. Cheap.’ So, one night, I was thinking. If I could do this for my relatives, why not for everybody?” The ad went on at some length, spelling out the special things about Cousin Arthur’s Redi-Cut Carpets outlets (coffee, no pushy salesmen, a money-back guarantee, free rug cutting), and it ended with what has become the chain’s slogan: “It’s like having an uncle in the carpet business.”

  I was so stunned to discover that one of those people you see pitching their products on late-night television was a relative of mine that I promptly went up to the Bronx to see Cousin Arthur for myself. I found him on Webster Avenue, at one of his stores, and he turned out to be an extremely affable man. He was also, incidentally, the largest Ephron I have ever met (he is six feet tall and weighs two hundred ten pounds) and the only member of the family I know of who has a beard (although I haven’t seen my cousin Erwin lately, and for all I know he may have one too). In any event, we went out to lunch and he told me about his advertising campaign.

  “I started this company in 1971,” Cousin Arthur began. “I’d been living in Detroit, working in the carpet business, and I felt that carpet retailing was ripe for a plain, pipe-rack approach, sort of like Robert Hall. I’d had a run with regular carpet retailing. I’d worked for Korvettes.…”

  “Is it true,” I asked, “that E. J. Korvettes stands for Eight Jewish Korean War Veterans?”

  “It’s a base canard,” said Cousin Arthur. “The ‘E’ is for Eugene Ferkauf, the ‘J’ is for Joe Zwillenberg, and Korvette is the name of a subchaser in World War Two. To get back to what I was saying, I thought there was room for a no-frills approach to carpet retailing with remnants, so I called my friend Lenny, and he found a location in Mount Vernon, and we opened up. We hired a small ad agency in Scarsdale, and they came up with an ad that read: ‘Redi-Cut Carpets, a nice place to buy.’ We stayed with them for about a year. The business was growing, but we weren’t getting results from the ads. I’m a great advertising critic, but I can’t create an ad from scratch. So I called Cousin Mike and asked him what to do.” Cousin Michael Ephron is media director of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, the agency that created the Frank Perdue ad; he and Cousin Arthur had recently become friends on account of a carpet Michael needed for his den. “Michael didn’t want the account for his agency,” Arthur went on. “Big agencies hate handling retail ads. The detail work is incredible.” Michael suggested that Arthur and his partner Len Stanger go see a small creative agency called Kurtz & Symon. “They made a presentation,” said Arthur, “and we got married.”

  Kurtz & Symon went to work and came up with the Uncle Art ads; in addition, the agency had Uncle buttons printed for all the salesmen at Redi-Cut. Even Cousin Arthur’s wife, Hazel, got a button that said Uncle Hazel. The ads worked. Pictures of Cousin Arthur as Uncle Art filled New York and Westchester County papers. Business got better. More branches were opened. And Kurtz & Symon began to press Cousin Arthur to take his advertising campaign to television. At the time, a man named Jerry Rosenberg, proprietor of J.G.E. Enterprises, a discount appliance store in Queens, had become a household word in New York because of his commercial, delivered in an unrelenting Brooklyn accent, that began: “So what’s the story, Jerry?” It was logical for Cousin Arthur to go on television too. But it didn’t work out that way.

  “I got scared,” said Cousin Arthur. “I’m no actor. I’m impatient. I’d gotten really annoyed with the amount of time it took just to do the print ads. They were doing these photo sessions of me where they roped off half the Mount Vernon store for two and a half hours just to take a picture. I was losing business. I was going crazy. And I didn’t think I’d be any good on television. Lenny could have done it. Lenny’s a real ham. Maybe the campaign should have been Uncle Len. But I didn’t think I could do it. Suppose I blew it? So I said, Let’s get a professional guy. They got an actor named Jeremiah Morris. Jerry’s about five inches shorter than me, ten years older, he’s bald and has no beard. Outside of that, he looks exactly like me.”

  Kurtz & Symon brought Morris and a toupee and a false beard up to the store to shoot the commercials. “I’m Uncle Art from Redi-Cut Carpets,” Morris began, and Cousin Arthur became upset. He began to complain to both Don Kurtz and Jim Symon. “He kept trying to change the actor’s performance,” said Jim Symon, whom I spoke to about all this. “Most of his complaints had to do with the fact that he, Arthur, was more handsome than the actor, and that he, Arthur, was taller. Then we showed him the ad when it was done and he complained some more. He said the actor was playing it too much like Jerry of J.G.E. By that time there was so much money committed to the ad it had to be run. It was an academic discussion.”

  A few weeks later, in the fall of 1973, the commercials went on the air. Cousin Arthur would sit in front of his television set, switching from one non-network channel to the next, watching Jeremiah Morris come on as Uncle Art six times a night. “I would look and listen and I would sort of resent the fact that he really didn’t look or sound like me. It really began to bother me.” Every so often, he would make his wife, Uncle Hazel, sit through yet another viewing of the commercial. “After it was over, I’d ask her, ‘Do I really sound like that? Do I really look like that?’ She’d say no. But everyone else thought I did. I began getting calls from people I’d known for years. ‘I saw you on TV last night,’ they’d say. No one ever said to me, ‘Hey, that wasn’t you.’ Tell me. You’ve seen the commercial. Does that look like me? Does that sound like me?”

  In fact, it doesn’t. But in any case, the commercials worked. Soon there were four of them on television, and soon Cousin Arthur and his partner Lenny owned eight carpet outlets. Cousin Arthur could hardly complain. Or could he?

  “There’s something I think I should tell you,” he said, lowering his voice so that no one in the Red Coach Grill at the Cross County Shopping Center could hear. “I think I’m getting a divorce from Kurtz and Symon.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m thinking of dropping them and going absolutely gigantically big into radio.”

  “Why?”

  “I spend thirty percent of my budget on agency fees,” said Cousin
Arthur. “On radio you spend nothing. The radio station writes the ad for you. And my selling will be done by disk jockeys like Bob Grant, William B. Williams and Julius LaRosa.”

  “But what will happen to Uncle Art?” I asked.

  “That’s a problem,” said Cousin Arthur. “We may be at the crossroads for Uncle Art.”

  “Have you talked to Cousin Michael about all of this?” I asked.

  “No,” said Cousin Arthur.

  “I think you should,” I said. “I think what all this is really about is that you wish you’d done the commercial yourself.”

  “I do wish I’d done it,” said Cousin Arthur. “I can’t get angry at anyone about it, though. I could have done it. It was my fault I didn’t. But you want to know a thing I really regret? I had a chance to be head of a giant record company once. That I really regret. For five hundred dollars I could have owned twenty-five percent of Elektra Records. You know why I didn’t?”

  “Why?”

  “My father talked me out of it.”

  That didn’t surprise me. Thirty years ago Cousin Arthur’s father, who you may recall is my uncle Charlie, told my parents it was a good thing they were selling their house on Turtle Bay in Manhattan, because the United Nations was being built and property values in the neighborhood were going to drop.